


Object Lessons: Season 3

by Polly_Lynn



Series: Object Lessons [3]
Category: Castle (TV 2009)
Genre: Angst, Estrangement, F/M, Family, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Humor, Jealousy, Partners to Lovers, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-04
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-21 06:00:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 24
Words: 25,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22556200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: I recently started rewatching Castle from the beginning, after taking time off after Dialogic. With Dialogic, I chose a line of dialogue from each episode to prompt the story. For these stories, I chose an object from the episode.Although I suppose in my mind these are "in continuity" with one another, one can certainly read them independent of one another.
Relationships: Javier Esposito/Lanie Parish, Kate Beckett & Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Josh Davidson, Kate Beckett/Richard Castle, Richard Castle/Gina Cowell
Series: Object Lessons [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1622947
Comments: 32
Kudos: 13





	1. Riddle Me—A Deadly Affair (3 x 01)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When is a coffee not a coffee?

_When is a coffee not a coffee?_

This is what he wonders to himself as he stands in the line that snakes its way around the cramped tables and nearly back out to the street. When he could have gotten coffee someplace where the line _didn’t_ threaten to strand him in the wilds of Tribeca seems to be at least part of the answer, but he shuffles another few feet forward and decides not to dwell.

He opens his ears instead. He tunes into conversation to the left, to the right, sifting rapidly through the exchanges for any dialogue worth stealing. There isn’t any, though. Not here, and not in any of the six linear feet of floorspace he’s advanced in the last ten minutes. His brain raises the auditory input shields again, and he’s back to dwelling.

 _When is a coffee not a coffee?_  
  
When it’s three months too late. He rewinds to May, to the morning he walked in with a cup for himself that he didn’t even want—a cup whose sole purpose was to be pointedly singular. He winces to think of it now. He kicks himself for it, because how goddamned petty is that? But then he kicks himself for kicking himself, because didn’t Detective Beach House have her morning coffee covered? Wouldn’t it have been _awkward_ if he’d showed up for the whatever-th day running with superfluous coffee?

_When is a coffee not a coffee?_

When Detective Beach House is no longer in the mix, and when that fact shouldn’t mean anything to him, because Gina is definitely in the mix, and that has only just now occurred to him. He almost abandons ship at that unwelcome realization.

He shifts on his feet, leaning around a pair of hulking metrosexuals bending together over something or other and blocking his view. He stands on his toes to see if there’s any hope of movement, and suddenly there’s more than hope. Suddenly, another body ties on an apron and things are moving. It seems silly to leave without what he came for, then. It seems, paradoxically, like it might make a coffee more than a coffee if he bails.

So he doesn’t bail. He makes his way up to the front and raps out his order. Two regular coffees and—damn, they have bear claws, so he might as well grab a bear claw, too. Except a coffee is not a coffee here—or at least there’s nothing so pedestrian as _regular_ coffee.

“Fast coffee?” The bored-to-the-point-of-pulselessness barista wants to know.

“As opposed to …?” He is, by principle and habit, unfailingly polite to waitstaff, but the ordeal so far is really testing both, and an edge has managed to creep into his voice.

“Pour over.” She heaves a sigh as though he’s just asked her to build her own cross and carry it the length of the island during rush hour. “Espresso, french press, siphon pot—”

“Fast,” he cuts in, half grateful that she’s eliminated all chance that he’ll dither over the latte question. He points to the pastry, both in the interests of time and because he might start flipping tables if he finds out that it’s a _griffe d’ours_ or cougar nails or something else here.

He pays for his loot and lets aggravation drive him down the block and around the corner to Maya’s. He enjoys the relative silence in his own head, all the way up the back stairs he ducks into. The respite ends at the battered metal push-bar out of the stairwell, though.

 _When is a coffee not a coffee?  
_  
When she’s beyond angry with him. When she’s _hurt,_ and _God_ he hates the fact that that gets to him. There are a hundred reasons that this isn’t fair, a hundred reasons why it’s a travesty that as Beckett goes, so goes the nation of the whole damned precinct, apparently.

But it gets to him that she’s upset, and he’s nervous about this. His heart is in his throat about pushing through that door and holding out the offering he’s made so many times before. His hands are shaking, and it’s got nothing—okay, _almost_ nothing—to do with the fact that she might quite literally throw it back in his face.

He can’t stand in the dank stairwell forever, though, with the coffee that is just a freaking coffee rapidly cooling. He grits his teeth and bumps the protesting door open with his hip. He strides down the hallway, or tries to look as if he’s striding, anyway.

He stops short at the sight of LT’s intimidating profile. The idea of running up against yet another cold shoulder is suddenly, miserably depressing. He thinks about turning tail—about going home, going on a book tour, going away, but LT spots him first. The cop flicks a pleasant, if puzzled smile over his shoulder. He’s looking for Beckett. He must be looking for Beckett, and that means she’s not here.

He feels a rush of relief, a rush of disappointment, a rush of confusion. He looks at the cardboard tray and feels the weight of the waxed paper bag dangling from his fingers. He wonders what he’s doing here. He wonders what he’s doing at all.

He spies the navy backs of the CSU team and hears the familiar cadence of their chatter. He looks back to LT and almost asks the man for help—for a read, a hint, an explanation of what it is he’s doing here. But he looks at the cardboard tray. He feels the weight of the waxed paper bag, dangling. He remembers the look on her face—the hurt that single cup of coffee conjured up—and he knows what he’s doing.

He holds the tray, the bag, invitingly up to LT, then slips through the door and into the crime scene.

_When is a coffee not a coffee?_

When it’s a bribe, a gesture, an opportunity. _  
_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Hmmm. This was supposed to be mostly about the coffee he DOES give her, and the smile she can’t suppress. But then it wasn’t. Hmmm.


	2. Apprehension—He's Dead, She's Dead (3 x 02)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s a little off her game as she goes about her end-of-day business. She declines to comment, even to herself, on why that might be—beyond an emphatic denial that it has anything to do with Penny Marchand and her Wheel of Random Names, that is—but she’s definitely out of it, out of sorts, off her game as she ferries coffee cups from her desk to the break room to wash.

She’s a little off her game as she goes about her end-of-day business. She declines to comment, even to herself, on why that might be—beyond an emphatic denial that it has anything to do with Penny Marchand and her Wheel of Random Names, that is—but she’s definitely out of it, out of sorts, off her game as she ferries coffee cups from her desk to the break room to wash.

She tries to shake herself loose from the strange mood as she stands at the sink, scrubbing away at the dried ring at the bottom of one long-forgotten mug she’d found hiding in the shadow of her desk lamp. She lets her not-quite-focused eyes wander over the array of photos tacked up to the break room wall. She idly studies the irregular rows of dogs and kids—people’s families with pictures of cops themselves, on the job and off, mixed in here and there. It’s an odd collection, or maybe it’s just odd to her the way those moments are all jumbled together. Maybe _she’s_ just odd. 

She’s not one for snapshots. She never has been, really, either as a subject or as a … consumer or whatever you’d call it. It’s an attitude she and her dad share—a Beckett character flaw, her mom used to say—and one that’s intensified since that January night. Snapshots, even of her mom, are hard for them both. 

She finds it strange sometimes. In unguarded moments like this, when she’s confronted with the enthusiasm of others to stop time, to confine it to such tiny spaces, she finds it strange. Not the reluctance to have her own image captured without warning. That “character flaw” is hardly the exclusive domain of Clan Beckett, though she suspects the reason for her distaste runs a bit far afield from the usual.

She’s not particularly self-conscious. She doesn’t think of herself in terms of good side and bad side, and there’s no particular angle she can’t stand the thought of having committed to high-gloss paper. But what’s really strange, even to her sometimes, is the way snapshots—of herself or of almost anyone else—kind of embarrass her.

Toni Johnston is a case in point. She’s not exactly dripping with empathy for the woman—or even for Emilio Casillas, may he rest in whatever cheating, mid–life crisis dirt bags rest in—but her cheeks feel a little hot, and her stomach feels a little uneasy when she thinks about the way their methods and Vivien Marchand’s happen to have overlapped to an uncomfortable degree when it came to that Christmas party snapshot. It’s cheating of another kind, though of course they do it all the time in her line of work, and she always feels faintly embarrassed about it.

She studies one of the high-up shots of cop she hardly knows and a husband turned slightly away. He looks unhappy and she looks frazzled, with her hand on the shoulder of little boy who’d obviously like nothing more than to break away in that moment. But that’s all it is—a moment. It’s not the whole story, and maybe ten seconds later, the three of them were smiling and chasing each other around the park she can see in the background.

Maybe a day, a week, a month later, Toni Johnston and Emilio Casillas might have looked at each other with _What Was I Thinking?_ contempt. Maybe a day, a week, a month later they wouldn’t have looked at each other at all. They might’ve looked straight at the camera, or into the eyes of the people they’d married, or off into opposite corners of the world, and their mistakes wouldn’t have been frozen in time.

 _Cheating,_ she thinks again. She shakes her head at herself as she opens and closes drawers in search of a dish towel that hasn’t been shoved away, damp or dirty. She looks anywhere but at the wall of snapshots and tries to shed this weird, out-of-sorts mood. It lingers, though, and at the edges of her mind, she knows why.

She gives up her search for a dish towel. She makes do with the lousy roll of brown paper that’s swollen on one end from sitting downslope of the drain board. She wads up a ragged length of towel up and smears water around the inside walls of the cup, marveling not for the first time at the way they absorb less than nothing once they’re off the roll. She inverts one mug, then another, then another on the dish rack and watches a moment as the water rolls downslope.

She abruptly turns away from the sink, from the wall of photos, from her own unquiet thoughts. She breaks toward her desk. She rolls open the little-used drawer on the upper right, the one that’s been known for years to stick and protest, though she’s never gotten around to having it fixed. She rolls it open with a determined yank and reaches with unerring fingers for the thing that’s been on her mind this whole time. The thing that has a lot to do with why she’s out of it, out of sorts, off her game.

It’s a four-by-six on cheap drugstore paper. She has no idea where it came from. It’s a shot of the four of them in the act of taking down the board for some case they’d closed in the dark days of January. No one’s admitted to shooting it, printing it, tacking it up in the break room without fanfare. No one’s commented on its disappearance midway through the summer when ripping it down was a monstrously unsatisfying alternative to hurling one of the stupid, delicate, good-for-nothing coffee cups that had come with his stupid, fancy coffee machine at it. No one has dared.

She studies it now, the way the four of them form a circle. The way the two of them form a pair. She’s laughing at something Ryan has stumbled into. She remembers that. He’s sharing a commiserating shake of the head with Esposito. It’s the four of them, but her attention is on him. His is on her, and it’s … embarrassing.

More than that, it’s painful, because ten seconds after that, a day, a week, a month, her attention was still on him. His was still on her. It’s a moment in time that whoever it was could have captured a day, a week, a month, three times over from then.

And then a day, a week, a month on from that, they couldn’t have. They would have captured something else. The two of them, each staring straight into the camera or off into entirely separate corners of the world. The two of them carefully paying no attention whatsoever to one another. They would have captured the real story as it seems to be, and that’s more painful than she’ll admit, even to herself. It’s embarrassing.

She rolls the drawer open again. She means to put it back—to hide that aching, blush-inducing, painful, misleading moment away for good, but this mood she’s in has other ideas. She pushes back from the desk and rises to her feet. She makes for the break room and steals a little bit of Blu-Tack from one of the newest snapshots. She divvies it up and presses it into the four corners of the photo in her hand. She works it into the odd array—back into the gap that no one has dared touch since midway through summer.

She stands back and faces the moment. Not much changes. She’s still out of it, out of sorts, off her game. She still has heat creeping up over the collar of her shirt and feathering along her jaw, and her stomach still feels a little uneasy.

It’s embarrassment like always. That’s all. That’s what she tells herself.  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Clunky as HECK. Hmmm. 


	3. Appraisal—Under the Gun (3 x 03)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s game for a treasure hunt—unusually game. He doesn’t have to wheedle. He doesn’t have to so much as cajole or nudge or even plead, because the minute he asks if she’d care to do a little digging, she’s already tossing her car keys in the air and catching them again. She’s already heading for the elevator, because she’s game. He doesn’t know quite what to make of it.

She’s game for a treasure hunt—unusually game. He doesn’t have to wheedle. He doesn’t have to so much as cajole or nudge or even plead, because the minute he asks if she’d care to do a little digging, she’s already tossing her car keys in the air and catching them again. She’s already heading for the elevator, because she’s game. He doesn’t know quite what to make of it.

Well, that’s not quite true. He _understands_ it on some level—literal digging in lieu of metaphorical digging, emotional digging. That’s familiar, and he understands the sharks-don’t-sleep logic of moving the body to beat back everything else. But she’s damned near enthusiastic about heading back out to a cemetery in the dead of night. She’s damned near grateful that he suggested it—grateful that he’s riding shotgun, and they really haven’t been anywhere near that since he’s been back.

She’s been tolerant of his presence, for lack of a better word. She takes the coffee he offers with a cool _yeah, you’d better come bearing caffeine_ expression. She’s let the occasional real smile flicker across her face, and the two of them have slipped mostly back into their well-worn patterns as far as work goes.

But he’s been in the penance phase. He knows that. He rails against it in the privacy of his own head, sometimes, because she’s the one who had the stupid boyfriend in the first place, and he was just … he is just … . Well, he’s been in the penance phase, and mostly that’s fine, because he wants ease between them.

He wants that comfortable, mutual, _this is fun, I’m glad you’re here_ feeling between them again. He wants it enough that he’s willing to wait, to work, to do penance, and now all of a sudden, here they are. She’s game for a treasure hunt. She’s damned near grateful, and it’s not because of anything he’s done. 

It’s because of Royce. It’s because she’s suffered a profound, terrible wound, at the hands of someone important—someone she has loved. Whatever that has meant, still means, will always mean to her, she has loved him, and the betrayal cuts deep.

It leaves her vulnerable and game for this—a late-night treasure hunt. It leaves her grateful for his presence, and while a part of him is a little smug about that, most of him doesn’t feel like he’s earned it just yet. Most of him doesn’t quite know what to make of all this.

So he does what he does when in doubt: He chatters. He rides shotgun and thinks out loud about how he might eventually write the scene. He homes in on then-and-now details as she steers them back toward the cemetery.

“You can’t tell me you weren’t a little creeped out.” He turns toward her. “Or maybe you had to be standing _in a grave_ to fully appreciate the creep factor.”

“You don’t even know if it was a grave. Brooke Carver just picked a spot near that marker at random to start with.” The retort comes with a miniature eye roll and a shake of her head as she throws the car into park. He blinks, startled to find that they’re at the cemetery already. “Plus, you were, like, two feet down.” She pulls the keys from the ignition. “Four feet, minimum, between you and the restless undead.” 

She’s out and away, then. She’s winding up the path and through the gates, full speed ahead, and he’s panting to catch up.

“That’s a good point.” Her head swivels toward him, and he waves her off. “Not the undead thing.” He risks looking down his nose at her. “Your prose is a little purple, Beckett. Best leave that to the professionals.” Her fist shoots out to catch him on the biceps, but he swerves well clear of the blow, tipping the beam of his flashlight toward his own face to show off his missed me grin. “I mean the six feet under part. How big do you think this thing is? What do you think the stones are even in? I mean, it’s not gonna be a big, metal-banded pirate chest. “ He frowns, then lights up. “Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if it were a pirate chest?”

“It was the nineties, Castle,” she says absently as they pull up alongside the Gunn-with-two- _n_ s marker. “The _nineteen_ -nineties. It’s not like Lloyd was out here with a peg leg and a shoulder parrot.”

“Way to stereotype,” he murmurs as he snags the shovel from the turf next to the open pit that is pretty shallow now that he looks at it without a round-robin of firearms in the mix. “My point is, we’ve got no idea how big—or small—this is going to be.”

He trails after her, counting two up and six over under his breath, but she’s already there. She’s already shucking her coat and rolling up her sleeves. She’s already yanking the shovel from his grasp and driving the blade into the soft October turf.

He stands awkwardly by, struck silent by the way she’s fallen on this task with an energy that’s honestly kind of alarming. It’s beyond _game for a treasure hunt._ It’s beyond the part of this he gets—literal digging, not metaphorical, not emotional—and he wonders if he should intervene—if he should offer to spell her or just take the damned shovel from her if he can.

He stands awkwardly by in absolute doubt that she should be grateful that he suggested this, grateful that he’s riding shotgun. He stands in absolute doubt that he’s the man for the job right now, but he’s the man who’s here, so he tries to hold up his end of things. He homes in on the details. He chatters.

“I mean,” he begins again as though he hasn’t been struck silent for who knows how long, “are we talking breadbox territory?” He holds his hands parallel‚ palm facing palm for width and depth, but she’s not looking. “Is this the one instance in the history of the world where breadbox is actually a useful metric?”

The shovel rings out like an answer to his stupid question. The blade protests the sudden, sharp contact, sending a wave of painful-looking energy up the handle and through her shoulders, her neck, her jaw. She drops the shovel and goes to her knees.

He goes to his, thinking she’s hurt, but she’s scrabbling with bare hands at the surface of what turns out to be a flimsy blue tin of some kind. It looks like it might have held the kinds of cookies in ruffled white cups that great aunts serve at Christmas, as though the hard, unsatisfying attempts at sugar-studded shortbread count as dessert. She’s prying the lid open with fingernails that are dark with what he hopes is just dirt.

The gems sparkle like old Hollywood props. There’s just a sliver of a crescent moon and the inadequate beam of his flashlight, but they _sparkle._ She clambers to her feet, laughing in disbelief. He clambers to his, then reaches a hand down to help her out. They wind up in an awkward, breathless embrace that lasts a little longer—has a little more to it—than it should.

She takes a step back. He takes one, too.

“Smaller than a breadbox,” she says. She flashes a hard grin sideways at him, a hard grin down at the glittering pile. He sees in it the last real words she’d spoken to Royce, the man she has loved, whatever that means— _you’re going to realize what you destroyed today was worth a hell of a lot more than money_. “Smaller.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This one was hard to find a road into. Hmmm.


	4. Infrastructure—Punked (3 x 04)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She could use about one thousand percent less discussion of underpants in the workplace. From the general to the specific, because in general—hello? she’s worked vice, and who talks about underpants in the work place, especially when it’s still the first cup hour? And in specific, who needs to hear about his expensive imported boxers?

She could use about one thousand percent less discussion of underpants in the workplace. From the general to the specific, because in general—hello? she’s worked vice, and who talks about underpants in the work place, especially when it’s still the first cup hour? And in specific, who needs to hear about his expensive imported boxers?

 _Silk,_ her mind supplies, implying that she is among those select few, and when she turns to Lanie, the smirk on her friend’s face indicates that she was thinking the exact same thing. The smirk on her friend’s face, as usual, says that she simultaneously knows and does not believe the Kate can neither confirm nor deny anything at all about Castle’s underpants. But, in the unlikely even that anyone is asking—in the unlikely event that anyone at all cares what Kate Beckett, NYPD, needs—it’s about one thousand percent less thinking about underpants on the job, too. 

But apparently, no one is asking about Kate Beckett’s needs. 

Ryan rolls up, flashing the vic’s wallet in his hand, and now everyone is on to _Captain Underpants._ Kate closes her eyes. She takes a deep breath and counts to somewhere in the neighborhood of a million. At the end of her count, she does not care how many nephews Ryan has. She does not care how poor the taste of any one of those little hellions might be. She now has disturbing tighty whities on the brain, and she is officially walking away from this nonsense before she kills someone and has to ask Lanie or CSU or whomever a really big favor.

There’s no escape, though. She’s walking away, and she’s pretty sure there’s nothing at all ambiguous about her body language. And yet, Castle—he of the overpriced boxers no one needs to know about—is calling after her. He’s shouting out guesses about the possible forms her underpants might take, and she wonders if this is just her life from now on. She wonders if it’s just underpants all the way down. 

Nothing back at the precinct suggests otherwise. There’s certainly no relief in the interview with the vic’s sister. Not that Kate, even in underpants extremis, thinks for even a moment that such a thing is about her needs. She sobers. She studies herself and gives Rachel Goldstein her full attention. She’s sympathetic when the young woman is understandably thrown by the news not just of her brother’s murder, but the state they found his body in.

“His _clothes_ were taken?”

Distraught, she latches on to the bizarre detail, and when Kate’s eyes shift toward Castle to coordinate their next step, one she hopes will be decidedly _away_ from the bizarre, even if it’s only into the merely confusing, but she can see the thought bubble forming over his head.

_Not his underwear! They didn’t take his underwear!_

She manages—she _just_ manages, through sheer force of will, an exceptionally well-developed glare, and a discreet kick to the shin—to leave him tongue tied, just this once. They move mercifully past the subject of underpants.

It’s a reprieve. I feels like one, though she has to admit to herself at least that a switch of some kind has been flipped in her mind.

D’Andre the giant shoves the metal interrogation chair backward, putting Castle’s high-end silk affair in serious jeopardy, and she can’t shut her mind down before it cooly remarks: Commando. She can’t shut it down then, any more than she can as It flicks through Adam Murphy, Abe Sandrich, even Ivan Podofsky with a boxer diagnosis, subcategory flannel of some kid.

These are just the first of some deeply unwelcome moments. There’s Sir Thomas, their homeless man, of course, and then they hit the Gas Lamp League. At that point, she’s is _out_. She is just _out,_ except of course she can’t be. She doesn’t have that luxury, whatever her needs are.

So she studies the clothes of Owen Peterson and the rest of the people milling about the weird little club. Ultimately, she has to contemplate an entirely new set of clothes on Adam Murphy, and the whole time, the litany—the accusatory set of questions—is in the back of her mind: _I told you mine. Bloomers? Granny panties?_

She goes to his loft, to Castle’s place, because it’s a math thing. It’s a science thing, and she should be able to tell him that without the thought of underpants coming up, as it were, but there he is, in an utterly ridiculous get up, and she finds herself wondering if he can he even wear his overpriced boxers under that? Should her mind—her stupid, stubborn mind—even be asking that question?

It’s all a thousand percent more than she needs of anything to do with anyone’s underpants, and then it’s a thousand percent more than she needs over and above that, because Josh is at the precinct. She introduces him around. He’s not supposed to be there, but she has no choice, so she introduces him around.

And when she goes to get her helmet, her bag, her things, they shoulder up to one another. They discover what they know, and what they don’t know about one another, and all she can think is she knows what kind of underpants each of them wears.

It’s a thousand percent more than she needs. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Laptop has crashed literally 30 times trying to finish this. Hmmm.


	5. Confederate—Anatomy of a Murder (3 x 05)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He doesn’t know what they are a lot of the time, but today—right now—they are road trip buddies. They’re pretty good at it, at least by his standards.

He doesn’t know what they are a lot of the time, but today—right now—they are road trip buddies. They’re pretty good at it, at least by his standards.

“You have to let me find a station.” He reaches for the stereo knob, and she slaps his hand away. “We can’t listen to static!”

“We could listen to blissful nothing,” she says. She sighs as though it’s her number one fantasy. “If only you’d shut up!”

But she doesn’t really want him to shut up. She thinks they’re pretty good road trip buddies, too. He can tell.

Right now, he can tell, because even though she holds out for a good long while as he hums, off-key, to smooth jazz, she breaks eventually. It’s his seamless insertion of static noises and the way he lets a garbled traffic report break through the saxophone. She holds out, but he can see the way her shoulders shake, and when her fist shoots out to catch him on the arm, she’s laughing.

In general he can tell, because she’s been far too quick with answers to every ridiculous question that has come out of his mouth as they’ve lurched along in traffic—because it’s nearly the middle of the night, but it’s Manhattan to Jersey, and they’ve still had to lurch along in traffic. He doesn’t mind so much, though, and he can tell she doesn’t either from the way she’s piped right up about breakfast cereal and Saturday morning cartoons, about action movies and ideal pasta shapes for different sauces.

She’s been far too amused by the silly arguments they’ve been swimming in and out of as Manhattan finally loosens its grip enough that they make it over the bridge and onward toward scenic Hillsdale, and he’s glad to know he can definitely add road trip buddies to the list of things they are.

And then she lets him buy … whatever meal you’d call this.

“You slapped me!” He shows her the back of his hand as though there’s still evidence of her last, particularly stinging blow. “These are my livelihood, Beckett.”

She rolls her eyes. “If I’ve threatened your livelihood, shouldn’t _I_ be buying _you_ a meal?”

“Are you offering just compensation?” He arches an eyebrow and manages not to break when she swears under her breath. “Because we should probably have legal representation if we’re going to go that route.”

“It is Jersey.” She pivots to take in the clientele and the decidedly negative ambience. She lowers her voice so only he can hear. “Bound to be at least a couple personal injury attorneys around.”

“Bound to be.” He grins at her. “But I think we can settle out of court. You could just agree to let me buy you a highly questionable fast food burger on the wrong side of the river—

“How does that even—“

He rolls on, ignoring the interruption, “ _—or_ you can go find a friend and brace for the consequences. All our secrets will come out in the trial of the century.”

“Trial of the century,” she mutters. She rolls her eyes again, but she goes.

He rocks back and forth on his feet, smiling to himself as she wanders off to find the least sticky table Burgeropolis has to offer. He watches, and he’d like to add an appellation to cover what this makes them—the Wild Lunch Bunch or something—but he shuffles forward, flanked by hungry stoners, and for the moment, he’s content with road trip buddies.

They dawdle longer than they ought to, given the late hour—given that it’s New Jersey in the middle of the night, now. She laughs at the _New York Times_ food section–worthy review of the unfortunately soggy fries that he launches into, and jumps in with her own details as he imagines Greg and Amy’s first meeting. She pokes him about Taylor Swift songs and what, exactly, a pair of young lovers might get up to here, there, and anywhere.

She wrestles him for the trays when they do finally decide it’s time to get going, and he lets her win. Back out at the car, she stands by and mocks him mercilessly as he disassembles burgers, carefully separating the cold from the hot before he packs away their romantic gesture in the insulated food carrier he’s brought along.

She mocks him, but he gets a sideways smile as she slides into the driver’s seat and aims them back toward the precinct. The ride back is quicker. It’s quieter, but no less companionable, and she helps put Amy and Greg’s meal back together on the other end.

He’s content to end one day and start a new one knowing they’re road trip buddies, and good ones at that, but she surprises him. Amy asks, incredulous, _Why are you doing all this?_ and she lays it as his feet—the credit, the blames, and everything.

“Because someone convinced me that a love story as good as yours deserves a shot at a happy ending.”

He’s bowled over by it—subtext that so unexpectedly sees the light of day. He’s overwhelmed and at a loss until she delivers a sharp elbow to his ribs and he remembers to hand over the carefully preserved bags of highly questionable fast food from the wrong side of the river.

They fade into the background as Greg and Amy get lost in one another. She turns to head back toward the bullpen, but he stops her with a gesture, a hand that doesn’t quite make contact with her shoulder.

“Hey. Thanks for doing this,” he says, not quite up to meeting her eyes. “We make—” He takes a breath, wondering if saying it out loud is a good idea, if it might break the spell or throw whatever it is they are back into chaos. He wonders, but it’s been a good few hours, and he decides it’s worth the risk. “We’re good road trip buddies.”

“Road trip buddies? You wish.” She gives him a sharp look, and his heart sinks. He steels himself for a parting shot before she walks away. But she doesn’t walk away. She doesn’t deliver a parting shot. She goes on. “You’re in so much deeper than that, Castle.”

He startles at the words. He feels his skin prickle all the way up from the collar of his second-day shirt. He damned near panics until he notices that there’s a conspiratorial glint in her eye. She hooks at thumb over her shoulder. He follows the line of sight to the sign on the back wall of the holding cell.

“Do not give _anything_ to inmates,” he reads aloud. His gaze swings back to the hard stare she’s still giving him, even though there’s a smile nibbling at the corners of her mouth. ”So that’s how it is? You’re gonna roll on me?”

 _“I’m_ gonna roll on _you?”_ she scoffs. “I give you five seconds before you fold.”

“Five seconds? Fold?” He shakes his head. He bumps her shoulder with his own as they set off, side by side down the hallway. “Is that any way to talk about your partner in crime, Beckett?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Late night. Struggle again. Hmmm.


	6. Solace—3XK (3 x 06)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are two kinds of people who are surprised to find that she is good at her job.

There are two kinds of people who are surprised to find that she is good at her job.

There are the people who don’t know her at all. They are the perps and persons of interest, lawyers from the bargain basement right on up to the top shelf. And they are more benign players—friends and shell-shocked family members, bystanders who might have something valuable to say, but who are always looking over her shoulder for the right person to say it to.

These are the people who see only an attractive woman—a woman who is younger than they think she should be, or looks younger anyway—and they underestimate her. They rock back when she comes at them hard with skills she’s honed to a razor’s edge, or they blink their way through her deft handling of an interview and end up starry-eyed, because, _gosh!_ the pretty cop lady is smart, too.

And there are the people who know her well. They are cops and prosecutors and staff at every level of the Manhattan criminal justice system. They are colleagues, and some are friends, and they know _parts_ of her well, at least.

They know she is isn’t just smart, she’s _intelligent._ She knows when to stick to the procedural straight and narrow and when to think creatively and act flexibly. They know that she is indefatigable when it comes to pursuing her cases, and she wins the _Cop You’d Least Like To Be Across The Table From_ award every damned year, thanks to her tough-as-nails reputation.

These are the people who see _only_ these things—mind and tenacity and an indomitable will, completely divorced from who she is. These are the people who say her name in incredulous tones when they hear that she’s been the one to bring around loved ones who had dug in their heels in about access to a vic’s home, their body, their _life. Beckett??_ they say, and she can hear the question marks piling up. 

He’s been both those kinds of people over the course of the last year and a half. He’s given her the _better options, more socially acceptable options_ line, complete with a head-to-toe appraisal that might have infuriated her if it hadn’t been so obviously intended to infuriate her. And he’s been the clueless purveyor of left-handed compliments about her empathy—her gift for handling loved ones and suspects in crisis alike.

But he’s neither of those people right now.

Right now, he’s her shell-shocked partner and she is no good at any part of her job. That’s what it feels like, anyway, as she stands a few yards off from where he’s staring into the wind-raised ripples on the surface of the incongruously still-full pool like it might have the answers to what he didn’t do, what he could have done, what he’s supposed to do from here. She stands a few yards off with a rapidly cooling cup of coffee she’s holding too tightly, and she feels truly good for nothing.

She goes to him anyway. She sits beside him, because sometimes that’s all you can do. She hands him coffee, because he’s handed _her_ coffee so many times before, because even though it’s warm for late October, he’s shivering, and it’s not from the wind is kicking up off that lousy, still-full pool, because if she hands him the coffee, he’ll say _thanks_ —one of them will say something.

So she does hand it to him, and he does say _thanks._ They both say something, and still it’s awful. Still she feels good for nothing until he says something—she’s not even sure what—and she says something—and she’s even less sure of that—but he’s laying his hand over hers. She’s folding her fingers around his, and they’re sitting there, side-by-side, and it’s something, at least.

She looks down and sees the irritated skin, not quite covered by his jacket sleeve where the phone cord cut into his wrist. She sees the tell-tale ink stain that means he can deny it all he wants, but he commandeered the wonky pen she keeps meaning to throw out so he could correct the looping _r_ s in “Jelly Tyson.”

She feels the warmth of his skin, even though he’s shivering and remembers this same strong hand cupping her shoulder, pulling her away from Dick Coonan’s rapidly cooling body. She remembers, and sitting there, side-by-side, doesn’t seem like enough.

She thinks back to that moment—to all those moments that unfolded over so many hours in the aftermath—and remembers so little of what he said, what she said. It’s not that it’s a blank, it’s just that he was so careful to steer clear of anything but small talk, anything but soothing, silly things to keep her moving—to keep her present.

Her thumb sweeps idly over his knuckles. It’s a lulling motion that takes her out of herself. It snips thought from tangled thought until everything is floating free. Her mouth opens. Words tumble out on a laugh.

“You have very soft hands.”

He laughs, too. It’s just an explosive little snort, but she’d swear it ripples the incongruous surface of the still-full pool. It’s _something._

“Told you.” He squeezes her hand tighter. “Didn’t I tell you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Might be another pause on these. Hmmm. But, youse guys: THEY WERE HOLDING HANDS.


	7. Entrapment—Almost Famous (3 x 07)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He doesn’t know what kind of corner-cutting measures The Package Store is into—he almost certainly does not want to know—but he’d like an explanation for the hand stamp that will not die. It’s been a full forty-eight hours and no matter how long he soaks, or how hard he scrubs, swabs, loofas, or exfoliates, the skin on the underside of his right wrist, the ghost of the tasteless logo still lingers. 

He doesn’t know what kind of corner-cutting measures The Package Store is into—he almost certainly does not _want_ to know—but he’d like an explanation for the hand stamp that will not die. It’s been a full forty-eight hours and no matter how long he soaks, or how hard he scrubs, swabs, loofas, or exfoliates, the skin on the underside of his right wrist, the ghost of the tasteless logo still lingers. 

It’s the stupidest thing he’s ever gotten in trouble for. Okay. It’s probably not _the_ he stupidest thing, but it’s up there, for sure. And it’s definitely the stupidest completely innocent, totally legitimate thing he’s ever gotten in trouble for, but Gina just gives him a heavy, disbelieving look when he tries to explain that it’s a strip club with nothing at all of interest to him.

“With males. Dancing, if you can call it that.” He follows her around her place as she goes about her business. She’s giving him the silent treatment, and he should probably go. He should probably let her annoyance blow over, but he’s feeling hard done by. “For ladies! Women,” he corrects himself hastily, then reconsiders. “And for _some_ men, of course, but the point is that one-hundred percent of the naked people were men.”

She doesn’t respond. She hasn’t responded once. She makes a break around an end table. It’s the kind of thing that falls over if he looks at it wrong, and it’s covered in fragile, expensive _objets d’art_. The move rather pointedly strands him on the wrong side of the room, and he has to reverse field. He has to reverse course, too. His current strategy is accomplishing nothing. Fortunately, the stinging-needle sensation of the evidence in question give him an idea.

“Look!” He drags his sleeve up, wincing as the movement irritates his already-unhappy skin. He thrusts his hand between her face and the pile of mail she’s pretending to sort. “The package has a six-pack. You can see—“ He squints at the image. It was lousy to begin with, and his attempts at removal haven’t helped. “You can _kind_ of see his—its?— _his_ pecs.”

“Pecs.” The mail drops to the table. It somehow remains in its absolutely neat stack, as though physics has been temporarily suspended in the face of Gina’s irritation. “Let’s suppose for a moment that you were at a male strip club—“

“We don’t have to ‘suppose’—” His fingers curl in a pair of air quotes that he knows are ill-advised, even before his index fingers straighten out again. He’s supposed to be defusing the situation, not escalating it. He clamps his jaw shut and gestures for her to go on.

“Do I have to ask _why_ you would have been there—at any kind of strip club—in the first place?”

She spins to face him. The fist she has planted on one hip holds in its grasp the accumulated resentment of countless squabbles. He realizes far too late in the game that the gender of the dancers—the gender of the clientele, for that matter—is completely immaterial.

“The ME found a hair on the body.” He scrambles to find his feet in the argument. “A man’s hair. We needed to track down—”

“We.” When she cuts in, her voice isn’t angry. It’s weary. She shakes her head. _“We_ needed.”

And there’s the crux of it. The fact that there’s a We that he is part of and she is not, and the argument is the same as ever from there. The ground they tread is so well-worn, the moves they each make are so familiar, that it’s hardly even an argument any more. 

It wraps up quickly, at least. It wraps up predictably with a protestation that she’s not a jealous person, with his head hung and a promise to be less thoughtless, no matter how intriguing a case gets. It ends with a kiss that’s icy, but melting, and he goes. Because the argument is done, but all the same, it’s a better idea for him to go than to stay.

His phone rings the exact second he reaches the sidewalk in front of Gina’s building. It’s a generic ringtone, these days. It’s the better part of valor after an earlier iteration of this same argument, but he knows it’s her. He cranes his neck to find Gina’s window on the very top floor. He thinks about letting it dump to voicemail, but that’s not the promise he made, and anyway the body is nearby enough that he can hoof it there.

She’s by the front bumper of her car, pulling on her gloves as he arrives. He spies the ghost of the shoddy logo on the underside of her right wrist.

“No luck getting rid of that?” His hand falls away just short of her skin as he belatedly registers the intimacy of the would-be gesture.

“No.” She shrugs a shoulder and shakes the sleeve of her coat down. “Stubborn, I guess.”

She _guesses._ The persistence of the stamp hasn’t been an issue for her. There’s an elastic tug inside him as that registers, and the question he really shouldn’t ask comes pouring out of his mouth.

“Hasn’t caused you any trouble, then?” She’s striding off towards the scene. He gets a late start and has to take a few running steps to keep pace. “With Josh?”

The name comes out, too loud and broken into pieces, just as they pull even with the pair of uniforms at parade rest outside the crime scene tape. She gives him a sour look, but her answer is cool enough.

“We haven’t seen each other in a few days.”

There’s the elastic tug again, more complicated this time. There’s a _We_ she is a part of that he is not, and that bothers him in ways that it shouldn’t. It tugs his insides, down, down. But she hasn’t seen Josh in a few days, and with that realization, things snap back into place.

“Besides,” she adds. He’s holding the tape high for her to duck under. Her glance flicks toward the irritated patch of skin on the underside of his right wrist, and there’s a question in it. There’s a response that’s not quite so cool. “Besides,” she says again. “Why would he care?”

“I don’t know, Detective.” His free hand drops, not quite to the small of her back, to usher her through. Her chin tips up and her eyebrow lifts, not quite a reprimand. “Why _would_ he care?”   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Well, it’s not about tear-away pants. That’s all I have to say for this. Hmmm.


	8. O Tempora—Murder Most Fowl (3 x 08)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She finds his relationship to time completely baffling. She’s known him to ask Are we there yet?four times in the same one-minute interval and only the last one was a deliberate attempt to provoke her. But she’s also known him to blink up at her from the seat in front of the murder board he’s occupied the whole night long and ask, confused, if she decided not to go home after all.

She finds his relationship to time completely baffling. She’s known him to ask _Are we there yet?_ four times in the same one-minute interval and only the last one was a deliberate attempt to provoke her. But she’s also known him to blink up at her from the seat in front of the murder board he’s occupied the whole night long and ask, confused, if she decided not to go home after all.

On the morning they find Lightbulb Len Levitt in the park, she’s more annoyed than baffled by the complexities of his relationship with time, because he doesn’t seem to have noticed that everything in the whole world is off by an hour. He babbles about exotic pets and when she snaps that he’s the weirdest pet she’s ever had, he misses her Daylight Savings–related discombobulation entirely and grins as though he’s pleased as punch by his new title.

He’s still clueless on Discombobulation Day 2. He’s still annoying as he zigzags along beside her, dropping literary references and looking vaguely disappointed by the fact that she’s not keeping up—she’s not even _guessing_ —and it doesn’t seem to occur to him that she’s saving all her energy for downing the coffee he’s brought her. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that the cup she’s clutching in both hands is saving his life in at least two ways at the moment.

And then his bizarre relationship with time grants him another stay of execution. His early-morning flash of insight has led to them to the camera, to the time-stamped photos, to the only evidence they have at all related to not just their murder, but an abduction—a _child_ abduction—and she’s suddenly downright grateful for the fact hat he’s so untethered from anything resembling a normal person’s schedule that he thinks nothing of dragging her back to a crime scene before what would have been dawn two days earlier.

She’s grateful—though not without guilt—for the way time dilates for him as soon as it’s clear that the case isn’t just a matter of solving Lightbulb Len’s murder, but bringing a young boy home. It wakens that dogged persistence of his. It opens the floodgates of his imagination, for good and for ill, and in rapid succession he has ideas about putting out calls to local schools, making the absolute most of the quick-thinking shots Len snapped off in his last moments of life.

The age difference between Alexis and their abductee collapses to nothing for him. Her stomach does an unpleasant, empathetic little flip and she thinks about the way she teases her dad—the way she used to tease her mom—about _Parent Time_. She almost tells him about it.

She sneaks a sideways look at his worried face and she’s on the shy edge of telling him how next week, her dad will pretend to forget what birthday it is for her. He’ll pretend to guess and guess, and he’ll go on about how it was just yesterday that he insisted her mom bundle up to go to the hospital, even though it had been fifty-five degrees the day she was born. She’s just on the shy edge of telling him when he remembers, with absolute fidelity, the marks on Alexis’s socks from what has to be ten years ago.

Later on—and by then she’s lost all sense of how much later—he remembers, with absolute fidelity, what it was like to have lost his daughter for the space of an hour. It drives her forward. It drives them both forward, and by the same token, it grants her a vital moment’s grace to be patient with Dean Donegal, to crouch at his side and speak to him gently, to gain his trust.

It’s fitting, though, that the real breakthrough comes courtesy of his wild impatience. He notices the time discrepancy—eight minutes between the time the kidnappers shot the proof of life video and they time they sent it. It’s an unthinkable stretch of eternity for him, a man who dances with absolute fury any time his fancy-ass phone dares to hit him with the spinning dial icon when he’s trying to distract the boys with whatever kitten gif or video of some jackass leaving his pants behind as he attempts the idiotic internet stunt of the week. Eight minutes and ACE come together precisely because he cannot wait for anything, and she feels hope for the first time that they might pull this off—they might get Tyler and Dean out of this alive.

And they do get them out of it alive, and it’s due in no small part to the fact that time, in practical terms, doesn’t really exist for him. It’s due in no small part to the fact that the subway he rides endlessly some days is full of stories.

She calls him a little later. He’s run off to see a girl about a rat. She wants to know how that whole saga has turned out. She wants to thank him between the lines, like they sometimes do, for the way he becomes unstuck in time.

“Beckett,” he says groggily. He must have been sleeping, and she wants to laugh. She _does_ laugh. “Beckett, what time is it? I have no idea what time it is.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Yes, I’m projecting my own despair about sunlight on to Beckett. But the episode did air right after DST ended in the US, which I didn’t know when I homed in on timestamps as the “object.” Hmmm.


	9. Béguin—Close Encounters of the Murderous Kind (3 x 09)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s had dreams about her from the start. He remembers the very first. He vividly remembers it, and not because it was some spectacular, X-rated affair. On the contrary, his sore wrists, courtesy of the no-need-to-be-gentle cuffing she’d supervised had manifested in her standing over him, not quite out of sight, and just close enough to be annoying, as she made him write lines: I will stay in the car, I will stay in the car, I will stay in the car. He vividly remembers despite the fact that there were absolutely no other developments, X-rated or otherwise.

He’s had dreams about her from the start. He remembers the very first. He vividly remembers it, and not because it was some spectacular, X-rated affair. On the contrary, his sore wrists, courtesy of the _no-need-to-be-gentle_ cuffing she’d supervised had manifested in her standing over him, not quite out of sight, and just close enough to be annoying, as she made him write lines: _I will stay in the car, I will stay in the car, I will stay in the car._ He vividly remembers despite the fact that there were absolutely no other developments, X-rated or otherwise.

He’s had his share of _those_ kinds of dreams about her since then, of course. He’s spent a not inconsiderable chunk of his life in her company for going on two years now. It’d be strange if he _hadn’t_ had those kinds of dreams. But he has had them. He does have them, not constantly, but steadily and regardless of … pretty much anything. 

He can handle them. He channels them, in fact, into his writing. Sometimes they’re ferocious and have him waking with his heart racing and the sheets soaked, or they’re methodical and oddly clinical. Sometimes they’re absurd or bewildering or laugh-out-loud funny because the sex is incredibly hot, even though she yells at him the whole time.

However they are—whatever form they take—he can and does work with them. They find their way into Jameson Rook’s outrageous innuendos and Nikki’s devastating way of cutting him down to size. They rear their heads in love scenes and almost love scenes. They’re … productive, and that’s better than fine.

And, of course, he has dreams about her that have nothing at all to do with sex. He rehashes arguments and relives their most harrowing moments, over and over. His unconscious mind worries the decisions he’s made—the decisions he’s failed to make—absolutely to death, and he’s lost count of the number of times he’s woken up with tears on his cheeks and his jaw aching with the frustration of conversations that never go anywhere, chain reactions that never turn out differently.

He can handle those, too, mostly. Nikki and Rook need conflict, and it shouldn’t be _their_ conflict. Not exactly their conflict, at least, and his dreams are as good a butter churn as any. He leaves her, she leaves him. She’s jealous, then it’s his turn, and what’s eternally muddled in waking life becomes clear through night-after-night iteration. And when he gets it right—when the heart of it winds up on the page—he moves on from one wound to the next.

He’s used to dreaming about her, and he has a system. It’s not quite lucid dreaming, but there’s … a protocol for capturing the details as soon as she shows up. He keeps a notebook by his bedside for the first time in years, and whether he uses it or not—whether he literally snaps on the light and puts pen to paper or not—he _imagines_ that he’s jotting every impression, every emotional sensation down, and wonder of wonders, most of it sticks. Most of it’s right there when he wakes, however he wakes.

It’s more than a rain barrel, though, this system of his. It’s more than simply a means of stockpiling raw material that can carry him through any kind of writer’s block. It’s a means of managing himself, because he dreams about her all the time, in all kinds of ways, and he has from the start. He has a literal world of feelings about her, and his dream protocol is a means of managing the feelings she provokes, inconvenient and ill-timed, messy and entirely out of order.

It’s a system and it works. Right up until it doesn’t work at all.

He can’t pinpoint the moment when it breaks down. He can’t decide whether it’s been gradual or if it happened all at once. But when he dreams about the hickey—about the _hickeys,_ plural—he knows it’s been broken down for a while.

There’s laughter when he dreams about that—wild, passionate, buzzing, fumbling, nervous laughter that leaves his fingers tingling and his breath hard to come by for half a dozen reasons. He can feel the heat of her mouth working against his neck for hours and hours and the teasing nip of her teeth at his skin. He can feel the _dream_ of that, and his hands shake so badly that the pen jerks illegibly across the page when he tries to write it into oblivion.

Everything startles him the morning after—the whole day after—and it’s an absolute mercy there’s no case. It’s an absolute mercy he only has to stumble through a phone call. He wanders aimlessly around the loft, and his stomach does backflips the whole damned day as he remembers his hands sinking into her hair and the arch of his neck into the warmth of her lips.

It’s bad enough in isolation. It’s bad enough that the dream presents itself again and again, every time he dares to close his eyes for days afterward. But it doesn’t exist in isolation—not by a long shot.

He sits down with his bedside notebook, the literal and the figurative. His panting, fragmentary thoughts make a jagged edge he traces with a trembling finger. _Holding hands, feet in my lap, head on my shoulder, fingers down her spine, cheek pressed to my chest._ The images—the imaginings—are sweet and achingly intimate. They are quiet and infused with all-consuming contentment and fizzing, ecstatic longing that shouldn’t exist side-by-side. 

He sits down with his bedside notebook and sees these aren’t the words of a man who’s coping, managing, compartmentalizing. They’re not at all the words of a man who has simply had dreams about her from the start.

They’re the words of a man in love, and the system doesn’t work at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: In conclusion: HICKEYS. Hmmm.


	10. Operatic—Last Call (3 x 10)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She spends a lot of time pretending she has no patience for his dramatics. She spends a smaller, but definitely non-zero, amount of time genuinely having no patience for his dramatics.

She spends a lot of time pretending she has no patience for his dramatics. She spends a smaller, but definitely non-zero, amount of time _genuinely_ having no patience for his dramatics.

His Certified Old Maid’s freak-out about how much eyeliner a seventeen-year-old is wearing—a seventeen-year-old, mind you, who is not even his kid—falls into the latter category, especially given the seven-thousand-Mississippi gander he takes down her cleavage once she calls his button-popping bluff. For his whip-sawing double-standard alone, he deserves so much worse than the entirely malicious revelation that yes, thank you very much, she does have a tattoo.

But a lot of things—honestly, more and more things as time wears on—fall under the heading of pretended impatience. A lot of the time, she’s at least a little bit charmed by the fact that he has no chill. He _likes_ things and he _hates_ things. He’s easily excited by the most trivial fun facts, and he’s genuinely interested in people, their jobs, their lives. He is the very opposite of jaded, and in her line of work, that makes him a rare commodity.

There’s still the smug factor, of course. He loves to impart fun facts, to hold forth on people and professions and past times, and if it just so happens that neither she, nor the boys, nor anyone within earshot is familiar with whatever tidbit of information he’s just called up, enthusiasm turns quickly to ego. In those cases, however interested she might be in reality, she feigns exasperation.

His flair for the dramatic has been in high gear this whole case, and she’s see-sawed between actual and manufactured lack of patience for it. She’s decidedly descending toward the actual when he slyly reveals—or, rather, corners _her_ into slyly revealing—that he’s bought the bar.

She likes the vibe of the place just fine, and like any good, lifelong New Yorker, she likes to grumble with the best of them about the Disneyfication of the city. She even thought, for the most part, that his over-the-top nostalgia trip was cute. (And she does feel guilty—a _little_ guilty anyway—for accidentally implying that his cute days are behind him.)

But she knows he’ll drop a sum of money that’s well north of Jeffrey McGuigan’s auction price for the scotch, and coupled with the impulse buy of an entire freaking _bar_ … it’s a grand gesture too far for her _not_ to be genuinely impatient. She anticipates preening, and she likes that side of his lust for life decidedly less than some of the others.

It’s why she tries to beg off. It’s part of why, anyway. But he drops the first eight bars of “Piano Man” without the slightest hint of self-consciousness and she can’t resist. She gets tugged along in the wake of his enthusiasm for everything and it turns out that she’s glad of it.

Eddie plays his theme as their group rolls in, and he takes his bow. She locks and loads an eye roll, but really, after that, he’s waving off attention for most of the rest of the night. Annie and Brian trail over to ask with a painful mixture of fear and hope if it’s true he’s bought the place. He nods, but he doesn’t make a big deal of it. In fact, as people come in twos and threes—long-term bar maids and college kids who’ve only been busing tables for a few months—asking _Is it true? Is it true?_ he makes … the opposite of a big deal of it.

He’s as close to uncomfortable with the attention as she’s ever seen him. He’s polite, still. He laughs and shakes hands and strikes heroic poses when someone simply won’t be shaken off, but she can tell that he’d rather not be doing this.

She wonders if it’s the scotch. If he’d just like something closer to private time with his special bottle. She wonders if _that’s_ what he’d really like to play the expert about with Ryan hanging on his every word and Esposito trying not to. But he peels away at some point, and she doesn’t think that’s it.

She sees him huddled up with Brian at one end of the bar. She watches as he jots things down on cocktail napkin after cocktail napkin until the bartender finally scrounges up a pad of paper. He writes intently for a few solid minutes, then catches Brian’s attention again. She can tell he’s speaking in what passes for a low voice in the din of a bar that’s been pulled back from the brink of annihilation.

She gives herself an eye roll for even thinking of it in such melodramatic terms and excuses herself from the table at the far back of the room. She creeps up on him, genuinely curious about what he’s up to—genuinely perplexed by the apologetic gestures he’s making. She’s so perplexed that she almost runs right into one as he turns suddenly in the act of asking about something.

“Beckett!” he exclaims. “Don’t sneak up on me!”

He presses a hand to his heart and goes weak-kneed against the bar. It’s all theater as he hastily folds his napkins and scraps of paper. She has no patience for it. She keeps her eyes on his hands as he stuffs whatever he’s been writing into his back pocket. He feels the weight of her stare and finally trails off.

“You get lost?” She tips her head to the side, letting him know he’s caught.

“Lost?” He looks over his shoulder as though Brian might save him, but the man is attending to his backlog of customers. “No, I—” He fiddles with the last scrap of paper. “I just figured—” He stops and starts again. “Lot of people work here. And I figured Brian would know how many and who and what I should … you know— _know,_ now that I own a bar.”

He’s flustered. He steals a peek at her, and she can see he’s more than flustered, he’s overwhelmed by the idea of the livelihoods he suddenly holds in his hands—the downstream consequences of his enthusiasm for everything. That’s the flip side of the tendency toward smug. When he doesn’t know, he asks. He dives in and finds out, and she’s charmed by that.

She lets it slip—a smile that he catches and shines right back at her. They stand there in the din, grinning at each other like tourists or something until he saves them from a fate worse than death.

“So what are you up to?” he asks as he saunters toward her. “Here to demand a second taste of the most breath-taking scotch of the last two centuries?” He falls boldly into step beside her, not bothering to flinch away when her elbow shoots out and just misses him. “I was thinking we should simply smash our first-round glasses. Seems fitting.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She tips her head back to study the ceiling. “I was thinking we’d find a little root beer to mix in.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Is the object the scotch? The bar? The melodrama? Hmmm.


	11. Some Assembly—Nikki Heat (3 x 11)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He can’t figure out what to do with Natalie Rhodes. Not the woman herself. She, thankfully, is long gone. But it seems impossible that such a character—such a very strange seventy-two hours—wouldn’t somehow find their way into the book he’s supposed to be writing. And Gina, in the final analysis, might not have been right about a lot of things, but he certainly he ought to be writing the damned book. He’s not really writing the book though, and at the moment, he tells himself it’s almost entirely because he can’t figure out what to do with Natalie Rhodes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This assumes the originally intended airing order, where Poof! You’re Dead comes first and Castle and Gina have already parted ways. This episode makes no sense to me, otherwise.

He can’t figure out what to do with Natalie Rhodes. Not the woman herself. She, thankfully, is long gone. But it seems impossible that such a character—such a very strange seventy-two hours—wouldn’t somehow find their way into the book he’s supposed to be writing. And Gina, in the final analysis, might not have been right about a lot of things, but he certainly he ought to be writing the damned book. He’s not really writing the book though, and at the moment, he tells himself it’s almost entirely because he can’t figure out what to do with Natalie Rhodes.

Part of it is the fact that she’s unbelievable. He taps away, recording literal events—like her “Basic Famous Person Disguise” and the fact that she apparently travels with ready-to sign, full-sized headshots tucked into her cleavage or something—and it reads as some kind of overblown caricature.

That shouldn’t particularly bother him. Everything LA is overblown by New York standards, and he could certainly walk a B-level starlet in and out of Nikki’s world in a cool ten pages. His readers would let him get away with it. But he kind of doesn’t want to get away with it.

It’s partly the brief glimpses of the woman as an actual person. He recognizes the genuine insecurity that feeds the attention-seeking beast, courtesy of his mother, of Meredith, of however many performers he’s killed time with. And Lord knows he relates to the instant, all-consuming infatuation with a certain NYPD Detective. 

And that’s also part of it. That might be the largest part of why he doesn’t know what to do with Natalie Rhodes. Because in the critical moment he knew exactly what he was _not_ going to do with Natalie Rhodes, and that’s … taking up a great deal of headspace.

Her sudden appearance, bewigged and bedecked in what she must have thought was dead-on Beckett Wear, had thrown him, to say the least. He’d already been warming to her, in both fact and Beckett-irritating fiction as the shine good Detective had taken to her would-be portrayer had started to tarnish. And there’d been some definite appeal in finding himself the sudden center of Ms. Rhodes’ attention, especially after twenty-four hours of being treated like a coat rack.

There’s a logical outcome to all that. There’s a scene that writes itself, where he, having recently escaped the decidedly chilly confines of a decaying relationship with his ex-wife, succumbs to the flattering and insistent advances of a Hollywood starlet—B-level or not—who wants to role-play their current, mutual dream woman.

It writes itself, but that’s not what happened, and he doesn’t know what to do with events as they failed to unfold. He doesn’t know how to explain his _No_ in the critical moment. He doesn’t know who there really is to explain it to, not at this late date, anyway.

He thinks it might come down to a cardboard box. His pen finally begins to move across the page as he tries to make sense of that peculiar thought. He feels the slight weight of the box under his arm, its uncomfortable dimensions digging into his armpit and making his shoulder ache in the few, dazed moments that he held it as he gawked at the vision Natalie had conjured up. He thinks it comes down to the thunk of a mostly empty box hitting tiled floor of the elevator car.

It’s synesthesia, that hollow sound. It’s a too-apt metaphor that captures the critical, illogical, unalterable moment he knew exactly what he was not going to do with Natalie Rhodes, because his dream woman isn’t a dream woman at all. She’s not built up from seventy-two hours and a special delivery box, any more than she’s an invention of his overactive mind and his pen finally moving across the page.

She—Beckett—is irreducible, and it’s not at all Natalie Rhodes he doesn’t know what to do with.

He hangs his head. The lined yellow page he’s landed on is close to full, and it has four or five friends that have come before. It’s kind of pathetic, but it’s more than he’s written in far too long, even if it’s unlikely to do him any good at all. He caps his fountain pen and pushes back from the desk. He gets to his feet then leaves them again the next second.

He plants his butt back in the damned office chair and rolls hard enough into the desk’s wooden edge that it knocks the breath out of him for a long, painful moment. It’s another too-apt metaphor, he thinks as he props the pad off to his left and pulls the laptop toward him.

He forces himself to make something of the scenario. He forces his fingers to move across the keys. He writes Rook into temptation and an overblown, B-level starlet, fresh off the studio-funded jet from LA finds her way into Nikki’s world, along with the emphatic, absolutely unambiguous _No._

It works on the page. There’s nothing illogical or unbelievable about it there. Rook peels the starlet off his body and emphatically says he loves Nikki. He loves her, and his head is not about to be turned by some pale imitation, direct from a cardboard box.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Little boxes on the hillside. Hmmm.


	12. Showman—Poof! You're Dead (3 x 12)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s finding herself in a lot of out-of-the-way spaces lately. She’s chased her way through forgotten tunnels and watched, with bated breath, at the revelation of secret doors and hidden rooms.

She’s finding herself in a lot of out-of-the-way spaces lately. She’s chased her way through forgotten tunnels and watched, with bated breath, at the revelation of secret doors and hidden rooms.

It’s a weird theme. And kind of a cool one, though she feels like that’s not something Kate Beckett, NYPD, is allowed to say out loud. It’s not like she has to, though. He’s reliably excited enough for any two adult human beings, and he’s been there for every stop on this odd little tour that, by her reckoning, stretches all the way back to Kitty Canary’s hall of mirrors and takes a couple of detours through Chinatown and the underbelly of New York City as the roaring twenties roared. And that’s not even counting the cemetery treasure hunt.

He’s been there, grinning hard and narrating in such grandiose fashion that it makes half of her want to roll her eyes, and the other half want to curl up and listen close. He’s been there and that’s freed her up to maintain her dignity. It _has_ done that till now, anyway, but it seems the dignity of Kate Beckett, NYPD, is no match for the giddy excitement of little Katie Beckett at the prospect of uncovering the secret workshop of the man behind Drake’s Magic Shop.

She studies the seemingly impenetrable brick wall with a sharp gaze. Her fingers move confidently over the rough, chalky surface that makes her spine itch a little, that makes her press onward until they find …

“Open sesame!”

She smiles so hard that she can almost feel the force of it bouncing right back at her off the brick. She turns a fraction of an inch, just to make sure of him—just to enjoy the way his jaw drops and the soft _Whoa!_ that escapes him. She turns a fraction of an inch, then rushes onward, knowing he’s following close behind.

It feels curiously . . _. right._ She doesn’t have another word for the shiver and rush of it. She doesn’t have a way of explaining, even to herself, that it’s absolutely _right_ the way something whirs and groans and the wall seals itself up again with a tremendous bang. 

Things go on unfolding exactly the way they should. There’s light from who knows where, but it’s not enough. There’s her flashlight, and then his when he finally thinks of it, and she can’t contain her excitement at all as she sweeps the narrow beam here and there, studying the treasure trove of things familiar and unfamiliar.

Kate Beckett, NYPD, is somewhere inside, knocking at her skull, her ribs, her still-tingling vertebrae. She’s intoning loudly that there’s a murder to solve and she shouldn’t be acting like a ten-year-old, hoping against hope on any given Saturday that she might need to dig out her sequined leotard and fishnet tights because her grandfather finds himself in need of a lovely assistant for his show at a rec center or an old folks’ home or a local library.

But Kate Beckett, NYPD, has no power here. Little Katie Beckett has the run of the place and she can’t stop taking inventory. She can’t stop smiling and going on about all the possibilities she finds herself suddenly locked up tight with. She can’t even bring herself to snap when the arc of her flashlight beam finds him with his head in the double-doored mirror box.

She laughs instead at the awkward way he pulls up short to avoid whacking her in the shoulder with the corner of the box. She steps closer, grinning like an idiot, and she suddenly wants to tell him how glad she is that he’s the one who’s been along for this weird, cool ride. She wants to confess that it’s all been more than a little thrilling and she likes the fact that he loves Drake’s as much as she does. 

She steps closer and the rightness of it—the _fun_ she’s having—is all a little overwhelming. It’s all a little dangerous and Kate Beckett, NYPD, is entering panic mode, somewhere deep beneath the surface. She’s sounding all kinds of alarms, but Kate—just Kate—stays her with a sudden, surprising move. Kate—just Kate—lifts her hands, and with a playful gesture, with a full-on grin, she shuts the mirror box doors right in his startled, ridiculous face.

She says the quietest thing, the strangest thing, the _right_ thing that she means the most.

“You know, you would have liked my grandfather.”

The truth of it catches her off guard, the shiver and rush. She _misses_ her grandfather, suddenly and fiercely, in a way that diminishes the joy of this—being here in this strange, secret place, and being here with _him_ —not at all.

“In fact, you remind me of him, a little.”

She wants to tell him what that means. She wants to explain that her parents never treated her like a kid—that her dad probably didn’t know _how_ to treat her like a kid, and her mom made the choice every day _not_ to, and she loved that.

But she also loved how her grandfather—right up until the end— _always_ treated her like a kid in the best possible way, with a ready supply of candy on hand and the corniest jokes in the world. He taught her card tricks and lured her into playing outrageous games of make believe.

She wants to tell him—Castle—all about it and how her grandfather would have loved not just this place, but Beau James’ booby-trapped hidey-hole and even Kitty Canary’s murderous hall of mirrors, but it’s a lot, this weird, cool jaunt through out-of-the-way spaces and the reality that there’s no one she’d rather have taken it with.

It’s a lot, and not just for her, she realizes. There’s a pause. There’s a muffled intake of breath inside the mirror box. She thinks, for no reason she can name, of P. T. Barnum and _This Way to the Great Egress._ She wants to laugh. She wants to die of embarrassment and Kate Beckett, NYPD, has some thoughts on how she might accomplish that. Kate Beckett, NYPD, wants an explanation for whatever’s come over her lately, but he moment passes. They live through it.

He lets out his breath. She lets out hers. She grins and she knows, without a doubt, that he’s grinning right back at her inside the mirror box, and it’s curiously _right._ She doesn’t have another word for it. 

“I’m flattered.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: OMFG, if this computer does not stop crashing … Hmmm.


	13. Vermillion—Knockdown (3 x 13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (It’s not my blood)

_(It’s not my blood)_

There’s a gaping eternity between the moment he sees the lurid spray across the soft white of her sweater _(You’re hit!)_ and her razor-sharp assertion _(It’s not my blood),_ and he’s not sure how he hasn’t withered away in the interval. He’s not sure how the entire city hasn’t crumbled into nothing ten times over, but he clings to those four syllables.

They hold him in the here and now. They’re a tether that binds him fast to the next eternity where John Raglan is making the most disgusting, gurgling sounds and the scent of coffee that must have been sitting on a burner since time began mixes with the hot metallic tang of the sticky mess bubbling out of the man on the floor. 

_(It’s not my blood)_

The words are a set of puppet strings jerking his head from side to side when she looks to him, the crackling radio held almost sideways before her mouth. It’s almost quiet but for that and the screams that seem far away. John Raglan is not making disgusting, gurgling sounds anymore, and there’s nothing bubbling out of him. 

It’s a shock every time he catches sight of it in the next eternity and the next. He is a stupidly fixed point, boxed into a booth by some detective whose name he should probably know. He is failing to answer questions in any way that’s useful. 

_No. I don’t know. The cup. The blood. Detective Beckett. I thought she was hit. It was not her blood._

He is a stupidly fixed point. She is not, of course. His eyes follow her into a booth and out of it, out on to the street, then back into the diner. They follow the action painting across her body in ever-darkening red, and he has to curl his fingernails hard into his thighs underneath the sticky diner table so he can hold on to the words.

_(It’s not my blood)_

He is supposed to get cleaned up. That’s his task after they’ve plumbed the depths of his uselessness in the immediate past, in the frenetic present, for the foreseeable future. Any number of people he knows, he doesn’t know, he should probably know, have told him that he should get cleaned up. 

_She_ tells him he should get cleaned up. The razor-sharp words snap him into the present. The stain across her body is corroded brown now. It stinks to high heaven, he thinks. He almost shouts back at her that _she_ should get cleaned up, but he realizes the smell is him. It’s the blood on his hands and the coffee he was kneeling in. It’s the burned, metallic, nauseating mix of the two and the puppet strings have him nodding this time. 

_(It’s not my blood)_

He makes it to his feet and the diner tilts crazily. He has to put his hand out to steady himself on the back of a booth. She catches his elbow and ducks to look into his eyes. She’s checking for signs of shock, and he tries to smile. He tries to give her some sign that he’s fine—he’s _fine_ —but all he wants to do is wrap himself around her and beg her to say it again, again, again. 

_(It’s not my blood)_

He finds the strength to shake her off, though. He says he’s fine, and the words make it out of his mouth this time, and anyway, she has to go. She’s busy in this eternity, and she needs him out of the way, so he follows the wall to the bathroom. He offers up a strangled prayer of thanks that it’s a onesie, that it has a lock. 

He vomits almost as soon as the lock is turned. It’s a shock on top of a shock. His mind calls up the sights, scents, and sounds of John Raglan dying, and that has nothing to do with anything. It is—unbelievably—some shield against the image of that dark spray across her body. 

_(It’s not my blood)_

He is gone forever. Everything he has ever eaten makes its way back into the outside world. He scrubs his hands and mops futilely at the knees of his jeans with soaking wet paper towels. He spends God knows how long hissing abuse at his useless reflection in the cloudy, scratched mirror, and when he follows the wall back into the diner, it seems that he’s been gone forever. 

His eyes find her. They unerringly land on her, first thing, and she comes to him. Her words are gentler now. They’re low and calm, and that’s infinitely more awful than the razor-sharp way she’d snapped at him before. 

_… close enough to watch the lights go out …_

It’s all he hears of whatever she’s just said. It’s more than enough to make him furious again. It’s more than enough to make him want to shout that he doesn’t give a shit about some useless has-been getting his ticket punched. 

It’s more than enough, but when he opens his mouth, even he can hardly hear himself. 

_When I saw the blood on your shirt …_

She looks at him, puzzled. She cocks her head to one side and there’s a long, long beat before she glances down at herself. It surprises her—the blood stain surprises her—and there’s absolutely no time to deal with that. There’s no time to process that she seems to have forgotten that it _could_ have been her blood. That it might be her blood next time. 

_Next time._

He feels sick all over again, but there’s no time. He sucks it up. He stuffs it down and follows hard on her heels as she strides for the car that’s still sitting at the curb, even though he’s lost count of all the eternities it’s been since she showed up on his doorstep. 

He follows hard on her heels at the precinct until she snaps at him, razor sharp again. She wheels around and jabs him in the ribs with one furious fingertip that conveys a quite explicit warning that he is _not_ to follow her to the locker room.

But he does follow her to the locker room. He lets her turn one corner that takes her out of sight. He clenches his hands into hard fists for a count that’s long enough to take her around another corner, then he rushes on. He paces a little ways off from the door. He scrubs his palms against his jeans and tries— _tries_ —to hear her voice again, but the four syllables won’t come. 

He’s at the point of shouting. He’s at the point of losing his mind and tipping right over into that first gaping eternity when she finally emerges. He’s a stupidly fixed point, pinned like a frog to a dissection tray by the glare she gives him. 

She’s changed her clothes. Of course she’s changed her clothes, that’s the whole point of the locker room. The soft white sweater is gone, replaced by a crisp blouse that’s blue, dark, dark blue, and he’s relieved. He’s so relieved by the change—by the fact that the contrast between this and the blood-stained sweater could hardly be greater—that he almost feels like he might laugh. Not now. Not in this eternity, but maybe in one that’s not too far ahead. 

“Castle.” She plants a hand on her hip and advances toward him. “I told you—”

“Black,” he cuts in. He goes to meet her, and his clean-scrubbed fingers find the no-nonsense sleeve that she’s turned all the way up above the elbow. He tugs at the blue fabric and works up something like a smile. “Don’t you have anything black?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Well, this was going to be 12 different things, and then it was the blood-stained shirt (and the pointedly not white shirt thereafter).


	14. Hoard—Lucky Stiff (3 x 14)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She has a secret stash. It’s really kind of stupid. No, not kind of. It’s very stupid, but she has a secret stash of his handwriting.

She has a secret stash. It’s really kind of stupid. No, not kind of. It’s very stupid, but she has a secret stash of his handwriting. 

It sits in a tiny afterthought of a drawer in her desk at home. A small drawer. It sits a few steps from the shuttered window that’s home to her make-shift murder board, though why that distance—that proximity of one thing to another—has anything to do with anything isn’t something she really cares to contemplate. 

Not that she cares to contemplate her stash at all, but sometimes she does. Sometimes she contemplates it so long and so thoroughly that she ends up denying it’s a stash. She tells herself it’s just odds and ends that have found their way into her pockets and from there into the desk to be dealt with later. 

Sometimes she tells herself that it is later, it’s past time to deal with them. She makes up her mind to do it. She finds herself on an organizational tear and she jerks the little drawer open. She plucks out the first thing that comes to hand and moves to pitch it into the trash. That’s what she means to do, but she never does. She smooths it out, whatever it is. She unfolds, unrolls, disassembles whatever it is and pores over it. She drinks in the stroke, the flourish, the emphatic dot and dash, then returns it to the drawer, which she closes carefully. 

She has a secret stash. 

It’s not everything he writes, God no. She’d be an episode of Hoarders if she pocketed everything he writes. It’s odds and ends. 

It’s his signature, sometimes, or his initials, in their various configurations: RC, REC, RR, RAR, more recently. She has two or three or six of those in precise rectangles with exacto-knife edges where she’s sliced them out of cards for her birthday, for Halloween, for the Chinese Moon Festival and a handful of things she’s pretty sure he’s made up. 

Sometimes it’s three-dollar words he idly scrawls in the margins of her legal pads, on the back of envelopes, on an active file folder once, and she yelled at him for a solid three minutes, then breathed a sigh of relief and quickly and quietly deployed her scissors to harvest the single word skeuomorph while he trotted off, tail between his legs to bring her conciliatory coffee. 

Sometimes it’s little more than a doodle with a few scrawled letters in the mix. She has a half-assed sailboat that she likes because he’s christened her the HMS Kate. It’s tucked into the little drawer alongside a delicate crescent moon with the word waning nestled in its curve. 

She has receipts and envelope flaps. She has post-its and index cards. She has a chewing gum wrapper he’d pressed into her hand one giddy night when the whole team, Montgomery included, worked through dinner. She can’t even read whatever he’d scrawled on the inside. She can’t make sense of it, but she likes the slant of the letters and the incongruity of his fancy fountain pen stuttering over its wrinkled surface. 

She has little things—odds and ends that fit easily into a small wooden drawer. Odds and ends that she can make short work of with a few sweeps of her palm and a trash can on hand. That’s all she’s had since … whenever this stupid compulsion started. 

But now she has the list. 

He’s only just gone. It’s late and she feels worn out with the pleasant effort of weathering his enthusiasm. She feels worn out with thinking through her mom’s life out loud and watching her words soak into the page as his hand and his fancy fountain pen moved quickly, boldly across it. 

He’s only just gone, and there was something curious in the way he folded the list in thirds as if to return it to the inside pocket of his jacket, then thought better of it. There was something knowing in the purposeful way he reached for her hand to turn it palm up and lay the folded sheet there with a flourish. 

For safekeeping, he’d said with a searching, solemn smile before he moved quickly for the door where they’d lingered. They’d taken their time saying goodnight, thank you again, my pleasure.

And now she has the list, ad it’s too large, by far, her tiny afterthought of a drawer, and yet it belongs with the others. It belongs with the doodles and the card stock and the idly scrawled three-dollar words that she forgets as as soon as she looks them up. It’s a thing unto itself, that list. It’s a sweet, monumental, breathtaking-in-the-absolutely-literal-sense gesture. But it’s also his handwriting. 

She carries it to the desk. she pulls open the tiny drawer and empties it piece by piece on to the desk itself. It’s a tidy pile to say the least, and she’s worn out enough to wonder how these irregular scraps of things could possibly have been contained in so minute a space. She’s worn out enough to wonder how they can possibly be contained at all. 

But they must be. They have to be. 

She goes to the bedroom next. There’s an odd hat box thing on her dresser that had once contained a terrible, forgotten gift from some miscellaneous relative. She has no idea why she even kept it, especially when she’s pretty sure the gift itself found its way into someone else’s hands almost immediately. It’s a round white wire frame with something like tulle stretched over it. It has a matching lid topped with a frilly bow that she tears off, first thing and tosses into the trash. 

She empties the mishmash of items that have found their way into the box out on to the dresser. There’s change and mismatched earrings and a sticky, half-unwrapped cough drop. There’s a foreign coin she doesn’t remember having and a handful of hair ties. She leaves the collection of junk out on the dresser. She’ll deal with it later. 

She tucks the box with its remodeled lid under her arm. She moves with purpose back to the desk and gathers everything up, piece by piece. She sorts as she goes. She clips the signatures—the initials—together. She finds a stray glassine envelope and stores her trove of exotic words. She folds remnants of their arguments together. She lays the list in with it all and taps the lid into place. 

She rolls back in the desk chair and regards the box. It takes up most of the desk’s available surface area. It can’t live there. She swivels to the shuttered windows. Her heart stutters sideways as she wonders for a minute if the damned thing would actually fit on the sill. It won’t, though. It won’t. 

It will fit on the bottom of the wooden cube plant stand underneath though. It fits there exactly, so that’s where she puts it, not even a few steps from her make-shift murder board now. 

She has a secret stash of his handwriting. It’s really kind of stupid.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Pretty bad day. Got a late start on this one, and it feels pretty rickety. Sorry about that. Hmmm.


	15. Retrieval—The Final Nail (3 x 15)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s obsessed with the dog in retrospect. Damian’s dog, whose name he doesn’t even know, and that seems significant. Everything seems significant, but he can’t help thinking about the way his face contorted in annoyance as he yelled for her to shut up as she whined and yipped in distress from some nearby room she’d been closed up in to keep her out of the way as uniforms and CSU technicians swarmed through the house. He can’t help remembering the savage yank he gave the leash as the dog bounded eagerly toward her own front porch to see if it was friend or foe camped out there. 

He’s obsessed with the dog in retrospect. Damian’s dog, whose name he doesn’t even know, and that seems significant. Everything seems significant, but he can’t help thinking about the way his face contorted in annoyance as he yelled for her to shut up as she whined and yipped in distress from some nearby room she’d been closed up in to keep her out of the way as uniforms and CSU technicians swarmed through the house. He can’t help remembering the savage yank he gave the leash as the dog bounded eagerly toward her own front porch to see if it was friend or foe camped out there. 

It’s ridiculous. The man killed his father. He paid an already-troubled young man to remove what he clearly saw as an impediment, not a person. He broke up a family when he saw money woes on the horizon once again, and then did his level best to bleed his wife dry, cheating on her all the while. Damian Westlake is none of the things he’s spent a quarter of a century believing him to be. He’s more than villain enough without being a lousy dog-hater. 

Still, he’s obsessed with the dog in retrospect. 

He thinks about her bloody paw prints on the carpet, winding around Victoria’s body, then pacing to the door and back again, over and over. He thinks about the fact that she never barked, and there’s an odd tingle of memory that wants spill over into a laugh as he remembers the red tailed hawks and a brisk morning in the park. 

_The curious incident of the dog in the night-time …_

_Okay, I remember the story …_

It wants to spill over into a laugh, but it doesn’t, because his friend is a murderer. His friend isn’t his friend. His friend doesn’t exist, and he can’t stop thinking about the dog. 

Barcelona is the problem. Barcelona is one problem. Damian’s bags were packed. The dog was nowhere to be seen in the house, and he has an obsessive need to know where the damned dog is now. 

He starts with where she isn’t. The neighbors—with and without dogs—have no idea. The Westlakes were not inclined to mingle, particularly of late. She walked the dog, or he did, less frequently. They didn’t seem to use any kind of service and there are no likely candidates for a mutual dog-sitting arrangement. 

With his door-knocking campaign exhausted, he makes inquiries that could very well get him in trouble with a certain NYPD Detective who tends to get grumpy about “misuse of police resources.” Paradoxically, he’s pretty sure that same NYPD Detective would help if he asked. He doesn’t ask, though. He’s overcome by a heavy sensation every time he thinks of asking—of exposing one more terrible side to the man he championed so fiercely and blindly—so he takes the more dangerous path. He makes inquiries. 

The dog is not with Simon Campbell, nor by extension with Vicki’s children. He spends some time with his fists pressed to his eyes when he thinks about her _children_ for what might be the first time since his phone rang that night. There are motherless, dog-less children and he hasn’t spared them a thought before now. 

It just about takes him down. He’s kept moving over the last twenty-four hours. He’s been poorer company than she deserves over a drink and a conversation she’d kept going for longer than she probably should have. He has robotically packed away year books and set aside reams of photocopied, marked-up pages from the great novel Damian never had any intention of producing. He’s cleaned things that don’t need cleaning, upstairs and downstairs. He has fixated on the dog and never once thought about the children whose names he does not know. 

He picks up the phone, then. He sees lurid purple and green pin pricks of light as his eyes adjust and he calls her. 

_“Castle,”_ she says, not _Beckett._ There’s concern in her voice, anxiety on his behalf and he doesn’t feel worthy of it. He doesn’t feel worthy of much. 

“I don’t know where the dog is.” His own voice is leaden. “Where do you think he—” He swallows hard. Damian Westlake, even in pronoun form, has him swallowing hard. “He was going to Barcelona. Without Callie, without anyone. He had to do something with—”

 _“The dog.”_ She curses quietly. That almost makes him laugh. It’s an odd tickle that almost spills out into a laugh, but she speaks again, and it doesn’t quite make it. _“Let me call you back. Castle. I’ll call you right back, okay?”_

“Okay.” It comes out almost as a whisper. “Okay.” 

She doesn’t call him back, though. She texts to say she’s found the dog. She texts again, not long after, though it feels like an eternity, to say she’s making arrangements. And then she knocks on his door—softly, because it’s late. Timidly, because it’s his door and lately they are bold and timid with each other by turns. 

She sits on the arm of a chair in his office. She has her gloves in her hands and the bitter cold of February in her cheeks. She won’t accept a drink. She won’t stay long. That’s the subtext. But she came out at this hour, in this weather, to tell him the conclusion to the tale of Damian Westlake’s dog—Athena, as it turns out—as he leans dumbly, shoulders slumped, on the edge of his desk. 

“He’d boarded her just around the corner,” she tells him. “Nice place with a big window into the room where the dogs romp around together during the day. They’ve got video on a loop.” She flashes him a pained smile. “It’s like … therapy.” 

“You went?” His whole body goes up in flames—an agony of shame, embarrassment, gratitude. “You went out tonight to get her.”

“I should have thought of it sooner.” She worries the leather gloves in her lap. “They’re seventeen and fifteen. Her kids.” She shakes her head and that just about takes him down, too. Seventeen and fifteen. Not much younger than she was, and he hasn’t given that a single damned thought. “Brave. They were being brave, but having her back—”

“We thought of it now,” he says, and somehow he’s holding her hand tight. Somehow he’s not across the room, leaning on the desk, because they’re bold and timid with each other by turns, and she’s holding his hand back, just as tight. “They have her back now.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Dogs are not objects, of course. They are people. Brain has been thinking about this dog for almost nine years. Hmmm. 


	16. Perfidy—Set Up (3 x 16)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She can’t put her finger on the first time she saw him produce a handkerchief with a flourish from the inside pocket of his coat. It was probably somewhere around the five-thousandth time that she’d snapped at him to—for the love of coffee—put on a pair of gloves before he went picking up and putting down every last damned thing at one her crime scenes. She’d ballpark that somewhere inside the first week.

She can’t put her finger on the first time she saw him produce a handkerchief with a flourish from the inside pocket of his coat. It was probably somewhere around the five-thousandth time that she’d snapped at him to—for the love of coffee—put on a pair of gloves before he went picking up and putting down every last damned thing at one her crime scenes. She’d ballpark that somewhere inside the first week.

She thinks it’s a funny thing, the fact that he’s roaming New York in his six-hundred-dollar jeans, but he reliably carries a white cotton handkerchief that’s absolutely plain. On the surface, it’s out of character. It doesn’t go with the jeans and the vast collection of cashmere scarves and sunglasses that only admit the most high class particles and waves of light to reach his retinas. It’s at odds with hair that’s perfectly cut, perfectly in place, at every hour of the day and night.

Beneath the surface, though, it’s not at all out of character. It’s a dad thing. And it’s a dork thing, because there’s always a flourish—always an _unfurling,_ as though he’d just produced a string of silk pocket squares, a mile long and in all colors of the rainbow from the mystic depths of his coat sleeve. It’s not at all out of character, because he’s a dad and a dork and his cheesy sense of showmanship goes right along with both those things.

She wishes, right now, she could remember the first time. Her mind calls up its appearance at the Gas Lamp League—the easy fit of his habitual gesture into such a ridiculous, romanticized setting. Her skin tingles with the memory of him unexpectedly pressing it into her hand, the hint of a smug, knowing smile as she startled and he dipped his head in the direction of the dueling pistol. She remembers all that. She remembers, but she knows that wasn’t the first time at all.

Possibilities flit, rapid-fire, through her mind. She sees his hands reaching for things, fiddling with things, gloved and ungloved. She hears the familiar snap of the fabric and pictures the lift of his chin, always the same as he produces it. She feels the transfer fo weight from her hands to his as she hands off some piece of evidence for a second opinion, for whatever wild inspiration it might give him. She replays scene after scene with the handkerchief always in a supporting role, but she can’t remember the first time.

_Sky Blue._

The name drops into her mind, solid, sudden, and instantly centering. She relieves the tremors passing from the young woman’s body into and out through her own. She remembers wrapping an arm around her and finding nothing but sharp angles, nothing but absolutely penetrating cold. The struggle to get her on her feet, the near impossibility of maneuvering her into the back seat of the car, it all comes back to her of a piece. It’s a play in one act that ends with a gesture, a flourish—the production of that clean, absolutely plain square of white cotton, followed by Sky volubly, messily blowing her nose, mopping clumsily at her own tears.

It’s not the first time. It’s definitely not. It is, though, the instance her mind was searching for. It’s the instance she needs in this moment, because Mark Fallon is screaming in the face of a vulnerable, terrified young mother. His voice is climbing the walls of the interrogation room. It’s an escalating roar calculated to make the baby wail, to make scalding tears rain down on that soft rosy skin.

Mark Fallon is roaring, and then he is not. With a flourish, he is offering Nazihah a clean white square of plain cotton to dry the tears he took such pains to provoke.

It’s an unspeakable act of manipulation, the way he withdraws his fury, instantly and absolutely. It’s cruel and necessary—maybe necessary—but she feels sick being party to it. She feels sick dropping into debrief mode as if this were simply business as usual. She watches Fallon as she tries to get her own heart rate under control. She notes his cool demeanor and realizes it is. For him, it is. For her, it might be, for the foreseeable future. If there is one.

She splits off from Fallon as soon as possible. She scans the bullpen and sees him, hunched over her computer. She watches as he rushes over to huddle with Ryan and Esposito. They have something. She sees they have something, but she’s still too rattled for anything like normal human interaction to approach just yet.

He feels the weight of her gaze. He must, because he looks up, frowning already. He crosses the bullpen to her.

“Beckett.” He keeps his voice low and calm. Dad voice, she thinks and an odd snort escapes her. “Beckett, what—”

“Do you—“ She can’t finish the question on her first try. She feels like such an idiot, standing here like this when the world might literally be ending, but she begins again. She has to begin again. “Castle, do you have a handkerchief?”

“Yeah.” It’s halfway out of the inside pocket of his coat before she’s finished asking. It’s not quite his usual flourish, but he hands it over. “Of course.” He studies her as she clutches the absolutely plain white square in both hands. “Are you okay?”

“No,” she says, surprising herself. “Yes.” She takes a deep breath and manages a crooked smile. “I have to be. We all have to be.”

“Yeah, but—” He frowns at her, then looks over his shoulder to Ryan and Esposito as they talk in low, animated voices. “But if you need—”

“This.” She brandishes the handkerchief. “Can I just keep this for now?”

“Of course.” He regards her with a mixture of confusion and pleasure. “But—”

“No but,” she says, re-centered and ready. “Just this. I’m good.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Weird object that sent me on a hunt for when Castle deploys his handkerchief. Brain is weird. Happy New Year. Hmmm.


	17. Fortification—Countdown (3 x 17)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The EMT tosses him a blanket as he fights his way through air that’s several times thicker than it should be to exit the ambulance Sluggish, he thinks, as his feet hit the ground. The impact shatters every bone in his body. It feels like that, anyway, and if she weren’t standing however many yards off, her smile wide in the blue–red sweep of the squad car lights, he doesn’t think he could go on.

The EMT tosses him a blanket as he fights his way through air that’s several times thicker than it should be to exit the ambulance _Sluggish_ , he thinks, as his feet hit the ground. The impact shatters every bone in his body. It feels like that, anyway, and if she weren’t standing however many yards off, her smile wide in the blue–red sweep of the squad car lights, he doesn’t think he could go on.

But she _is_ standing however many yards off, smiling—alive and smiling—so he does go on. He works out the maddeningly complex logistics of wrapping the blanket around his shoulders as makes his way toward her. It’s a shitty blanket. It’s warm, but somehow thin, and even in pre-dawn black he can tell it’s the sickly pale blue-green of hospital gowns and walls and food. It’s a shitty blanket, and she has a matching one, and he doesn’t think he’s ever been so attached to anything in his life.

He clings to his own fiercely enough that people notice. Esposito and Ryan, from a distance, catch him desperately trying to close his shaking fists more tightly around the fabric. Even Fallon gives his white-knuckled grip a curious look as he scolds the two of them.

She notices, but she understands. She flicks a glance from his blanket and her own as she makes her way toward Josh. She hunches her shoulders to get more of her body underneath it, she casts another slightly apologetic look over her shoulder, and he knows she understands.

He doesn’t give it up at home. He can’t make himself, though his mother and Alexis add their concerned looks to the gallery. He wraps the second, infinitely superior, blanket over the first, needing the terrible thing close to his pale, shivering skin.

It’s something like a talisman by then. It’s contagious magic that connects him to her and her to him, because she has one, too, wherever she is right now. But it’s even more than that. It’s his armor. It steels him to say the terrible things he must. His fingers curl hard, practically tearing at the stitching along the blanket’s edge, and he sends them away. He forbids them to ask questions, to say anything to anyone. He begs them, with his shoulders hunched and his eyes averted, to believe the lie that he’ll come along when he can.

It’s agony to let it go. He stands alone in his bedroom with it still wrapped tight around his body. He straightens his spine. He tries to roll his shoulders, and he feels again like every bone in his body is shattering. But he sees her again, in his mind’s eye this time. He pictures her fighting the same battle over this stupid, shitty blanket, and again he goes on.

He folds the blanket neatly and lays it on the foot of his bed. He dresses himself, practically sobbing as he uncovers his body, bit by bit. He stands with his head bowed for the space of one, shaking breath as the door closes behind him on an empty loft. He goes on.

He brings her coffee and jokes about warmth. He wears his heart on his sleeve even more than usual, because who can help it under the circumstances? They almost died. They might die yet. He loves her, and she might be the only person in the whole wide about-to-end world who doesn’t know that, and he doesn’t have his fucking blanket. So, yeah, his heart is on his sleeve, but they have to go on.

So they do.

They do the work. They pull against what seems like it must be true. They pull against each other’s perspective until they see every one of the players involved as people, until they can envision events through their eyes. And in a moment of absolute desperation, with his hand holding hers tight, they save the world. 

It’s a bit of a blur from there. He has a distinct memory of her throwing herself into his arms, of the force of her smile in full sunlight on an unusually warm February afternoon, but then they’re back at the precinct somehow. The boys mock them. Montgomery chuckles at their blind luck. They’re not hailed as heroes, because that’s not how this goes in their little family. Instead, they give in to the giddy laughter that has its hooks in all of them. They poke and prod and tease one another and it’s almost like normal again.

Almost.

They have a quiet moment, just the two of them, courtesy of Fallon, oddly enough. She stands facing him, however many inches away this time, and the shiver that runs through him has nothing to do with the cold. Courage surges up—determination—and there’s a rush of silvery fire all through his veins. It’s a wonderful, not-about-to-end world, and his heart is on his sleeve, because why not?

He feels a riot of words inside him. He thinks of the neat square of sickly place blue-green folded on the end of his bed, clashing with everything. He wonders where hers is. He has a sudden, urgent need to know, and he almost laughs out loud when he realizes that he needs to know because the very first thing he wants to do is ask her if she wants to build a blanket fort with him. He wants to tell her that he’s great at it. That he’s had more practice than she can possibly imagine.

It’s silly. It’s utterly ridiculous, and it’s the perfect way to let her in on the secret everyone else in the whole wide, not-about-to-end world knows: He loves her. He’s in love with her, and won’t she please do him the honor of building a blanket fort with him?

It’s the perfect, perfectly ludicrous way to tell her.

But he never gets the chance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Those are some terrible, needful blankets, fam.And this is dummmmb. Hmmm.


	18. Hush Hush—One Life to Lose (3 x 18)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s really the stupidest thing in the world. She doesn’t even realize she’s doing it at first. She sends Ryan and Esposito off to talk to the actors, and that’s completely legitimate, because She needs to be the one to talk to the husband—the director-slash-husband—and it’s completely legitimate delegation of duty that just happens to take her away from the set.

It’s really the stupidest thing in the world. She doesn’t even realize she’s doing it at first. She sends Ryan and Esposito off to talk to the actors, and that’s completely legitimate, because She needs to be the one to talk to the husband—the director-slash-husband—and it’s completely legitimate delegation of duty that just happens to take her away from the set.

But if lack of awareness is the first stage of the stupidest thing in the world, denial is definitely the second. A conversation with the husband sends them back to set in search of the assistant, and when she hears a trying-and-failing-to-keep-it-together voice in the back of her head saying something like _Nothing you haven’t seen already,_ over and over again, she simply ignores both it and the profound sense of relief she inexplicably feels as Reese Harmon leads them through a maze of hallways somewhere in the bowels of GemStar Studios where there’s nothing more dangerous than huge, framed blow-ups of headshots from yesteryear.

_Dangerous?_

She tells herself she has no idea what that’s about, and when she notices that Castle is shooting some decidedly odd looks her way, she chalks up yet another mystery. But as Reese leads them into their vic’s office—as the door swings wide, and she feels her own shoulders drop a good inch at the thought of plenty of space between her and any _Temptation Lane_ sets or actors—denial is no longer a possibility: One entire wall of Sarah Cutler’s office is filled with a handwritten episode breakdown, act by act. It’s filled with spoilers, and she would like very much to run screaming from the room.

It is the stupidest thing in the world. She doesn’t even watch any more. Hardly ever, anyway, and she’s in the middle of a _murder_ investigation. Accidentally finding out something about the most predictable genre in human history should not be on her top one million list of things to be concerned about, but that’s exactly what’s been at the root of her unease so far. It’s exactly why she was so quick to make the case to herself that the boys should handle the on-set questioning of the actors, and it is so stupid.

“Everything okay?”

His voice is almost inaudible beneath the shell-shocked assistant’s monotone list of details about their crazed fan. He’s close enough to startle her. He’s more than close enough for her to see that he doesn’t believe her for a second when she hisses Fine and takes an utterly awkward path across the room to the desk to keep her back as much to the whiteboard as possible.

They pull up the blog of the shipper in question, and it’s possible she’s never been so grateful for a lead in her entire career. She’s never been so grateful to be back on her own turf until she gets caught.

She’s trying her damnedest not to let her mind work on the details from the board. There are two many of them, even though she only got a split-second glimpse. A split-second glimpse is all her eyes need, though, because that’s what her eyes do—take in details. It’s what she’s been training them to do for nearly ten damned years.

She’s so caught up in the effort to sift through them that she’s not paying any attention to him. She’s not paying any attention to the way he’s prowling around her, practically sniffing the air because he knows something’s up, and then she’s utterly caught by an idle comment about Marguerite and her cancer scare.

 _You are a fan. A big, fat_ Temptation Lane _fan._

She opens her mouth to deny it. She readies her hard stare and straightens her spine to shut him down hard, but that’s not what happens at all.

She confesses. Kind of.

_Okay, maybe I watched, it, like, once or twice._

Saying it out loud—even just that much—leaves her with the strangest feeling. There’s a little bit of uncomfortable hamster wheel going around and around in her stomach for a minute or two. And then there’s genuine panic when Esposito materializes from the Interruption Dimension, but the two of them give him a simultaneous _Nothing,_ and in the wake of it all, she realizes she’s relieved. More than that, she’s … something else. The hamster wheel keeps turning, but she doesn’t have time to examine it.

The case goes on. And on. And _on._ It’s a shame that February sweeps are over, because in true soap fashion, they have a positive glut of suspects, all of whom alibi out. She dodges spoilers as best she can, but they’re back and forth to Sarah’s office and there’s just no avoiding the fact that Chloe’s baby is not Alphonso’s. But knowing doesn’t seem to matter so much anymore. She writes it off to coming to her senses—to realizing that it’s the stupidest thing in the world for a dozen reasons—but that’s not it.

He hands her an envelope after they have their killer. He sits by, smiling, as she opens it and waits not so patiently for the story they both know she’s going to tell him. There’s a brief moment of panic before she can bring herself to launch into it. The hamster in his wheel kicks into high gear and she recognizes something in herself.

She realizes that there’s a part of her that feels like she loses something of her mother with every story she tells—a really stupid part of her that’s been treating memories like something that can be used up. But in recognizing, realizing, _naming_ the damned thing, she takes away its power, and it’s right and it’s fitting that he’s right there, on the edge of his seat when she does.

That’s when she knows what the strange feeling is. It’s something like delight that she has a secret and he knows it. It’s something like delight that she has a story about her mom and someone to tell it to who’ll find nothing but pure joy in it.

 _Okay. I was nine_ … that’s how it begins.

 _I am glad to know this about you_ … that’s how it ends, for now, anyway.

He might tease her about it tomorrow. He might make some crazy grand gesture and buy up every scrap of footage that still exists from the time the show debuted. Or he might just keep her secret.

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t want to know. She hates spoilers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Those are some terrible, needful blankets, fam.And this is dummmmb. Hmmm.A/N: That white board, in the immortal words of Paula, gives me agita. Hmmm.


	19. Chapter 20: Hallowed—Law and Murder  (3 x 19)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He sort of means it at first. He’s sort of serious.

He sort of means it at first. He’s sort of serious.

“I’m not suggesting a full-on exorcism or anything.” He follows her out of the break room, casting a genuinely suspicious eye at the mug she’s sipping from so blithely. “Just like … a ritual cleansing of some kind.”

“Maybe a sage smudging.” She drops into her chair. Her delivery is so deadpan—and he’s so very nearly _actually_ concerned about this—that he almost falls for it. Almost, but she cracks a slightly mean smile. “Or—hey—what about Chacaw Te? You must still have your mummy-curse expert on speed dial.”

“You can’t tell me it wasn’t unnerving.” He glances behind him at his own chair before he sits, as if it might suddenly reduce itself to its component parts again. “The very idea that someone would use coffee as a poison-delivery system.”

“But no one _did_ use it. Coffee was a total red herring.” She grabs her mug and takes an extra-long slug. She lets her eyes slip closed and moans a little, which, by the way, is completely mean. “Besides, I thought you liked a good poisoning.”

“Well, of _course_ I do.” He cracks open the soda he does not want and curses as it foams over, soaking the thigh of his jeans. She makes him suffer for a long beat before she retrieves a handful of napkins from a desk drawer and hands them over with a smug look. “Who doesn’t love a poisoning?”

“The victim,” she says loudly for the benefit of nearby rubberneckers. “Victim’s family, other loved ones …”

“My point is,” he leaps in to stem the tide of parties who are not, in fact, big fans of poisoning and to bring the conversation back on track, because he’s sort of serious, “there was a near-miss with a coffee-related tragedy—”

“I wouldn’t call it a near miss.” She does some more coffee-related theater, raising the mug and tilting her head forward to inhale the aroma. “After all, poor Joe McUsic died with vending machine coffee in his stomach.”

He’s slightly less serious about it after that. He’s slightly _more_ serious about tweaking back, given that she’s seen fit to poke fun at his completely legitimate concerns about cosmic insults to a beverage that’s damned near sacred to the two of them.

Phase One is complete replacement of the break room’s existing stores of coffee and coffee-related supplies, ranging from filters to sugar cubes, with entirely fresh stock. She catches him—he lets her catch him—pouring the pot brewed from the very last of the open coffee into a huge thermos.

“Castle, what are you …?” She trails off as the freight elevator dings and a parade of delivery people with handcarts emerges and heads straight for them.

“Here!” He screws the lid on the thermos and beckons. “We’re in here.” She stands aside, slack jawed as he orchestrates their entry, then throws the cabinets above and below the counter wide. “Load ‘em up, ladies and gentlemen!”

“You …” She watches in confusing as the team makes quick work of the boxes and bags and packs their carts are loaded up with. “Where … where did it all go?”

“Donated. Shelters, soup kitchens, a few AA groups—all very grateful.” He allows himself smile that’s as close to smug as he dares. “It’s all about karmic balance.”

“Karmic. Balance?”

The words come through her teeth. He’s pretty sure she’d like to yell. He’s pretty sure she has a plan for some pretty elaborate yelling as soon as he finishes slipping each member of the crew a generous cash tip and they’re all off on their merry way, so he grabs his thermos and follows hard on their heels.

“Not just yet.” He’s positively jogging for the passenger elevator, lofting his thermos above his head. “The last pot goes to some of the regulars down on the street.” The elevator, for once, arrives exactly when he needs it to. “Nippy for late March,’ he says as the doors close with her positively astonished face on the other side.

By the time things enter Tweaking Phase Two he’s more or less forgotten that he was ever concerned about dark forces swirling around their elixir of life. Tweaking Phase Two is more or less tweaking for its own sake, because she’s delightfully annoyed that she never did yell at him for Phase One, largely because she couldn’t come up with a coherent thing to yell at him _for._

So he brute forces it. He strolls in—attended—on a morning she should be all tied up with paperwork. The fates are kind once again, and she’s on the phone with someone she obviously can’t hang up on as he and his companion pass by. He gives her a saucy wave and braces himself when he senses her closing in.

“Ah, Beckett. Here to watch the master at work?” He steps aside and behind him, a technician has the espresso machine largely dismantled, its parts carefully laid out on a soft white cloth spread over the counter. “Can you believe it’s _exactly_ time for this bad boy’s two-year maintenance? I, for one, will sleep better knowing that everything’s been given the once over, and there are no unpleasant surprises waiting for any of us when we—”

The kick to his shin is so hard, so lightning fast, so utterly startling that she’s already back at her desk before he even registers the pain.

“Worth it,” he mutters tightly. He bends down to rub it, waving off the technician’s questioning look. “So worth it.”

Phase Three is the most nerve wracking, because it’s time to make up. He’s not seriously worried about bad coffee juju any more, but they haven’t shared a break room cappuccino since Joe McUsic and the not-poisoned cup.

He goes on a night he knows she’s working late. Ryan, as requested, sends him a text when he and Esposito are about to knock off and she’s still clearing the inbox. She doesn’t hear the elevator, and he makes his way across the dim bullpen as quietly as he can.

“Break time,” he says. It makes her jump a little. That’s ok, though. Making up really ought to involve a little tweaking.

“What kind of break?” she asks. It’s a little sour, but that’s mostly because she’s tired. It’s mostly because she’s been at things too long. “Aren’t you off the stuff until balance is restored to the force?”

“Come on.” He nods toward the break room and sets off, sure—pretty sure anyway—that she’ll follow.

She does, though not right away. That’s fine for his purposes. He has his string of tea lights mostly set up around the base of the espresso machine.

“You know that’s a fire hazard,” she says from the doorway at the exact moment he flicks open the Zippo lighter. “Not to mention contraband.”

“The Elder Gods can only be appeased by risk.” He touches the flame to the last two wicks. “Have a seat.”

She shakes her head but complies. He busies himself at the machine, pulling them a pair of shots each and steaming a generous helping of milk.

“Would you blow those out before we have a tactical team in here?” she grouses, but her eyes light up as he turns with two brimming cups in hand.

“Yes, yes.” He sets a cup in front of her and one in front of the seat next to hers. He registers her sniff of annoyance as she realizes the cups are brand new—as she does the math and correctly figures that all the cups, for the espresso machine at least, are new. “Their work is nearly done anyway.”

He turns back to the counter and huffs out all of the little candles, save the one he carries to set on the table between them. She’s laughing quietly with her hands wrapped around the cup. She’s waiting not so patiently for him to sit, so he does. She dips her head to take the first eager sip, but he stops her.

“No, no, no!”

She halts with the cup a mere inch from her lips and gives him a perfect murderous glare.

“Detective, please.” He assumes an injured look. “The final, cleansing step.” He inclines his head toward the candle. “Make a wish.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I don’t know what came over me with this one. Hmmm.


	20. Commiseration—Slice of Death (3 x 20)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A vic’s home always packs its own specific punch. If it’s their primary crime scene, it takes second place, of course, to the tragedy of the life brutally ended. If it’s not a crime scene at all, there are a hundred unexpected stings waiting for the one who has to cross that threshold uninvited. There’s the t-shirt that didn’t quite make the hamper, the crossword with six clues still blank, the birthday card from two weeks ago, still standing open on the end table. There’s the ache of things just finished, things in progress, things left undone.

A vic’s home always packs its own specific punch. If it’s their primary crime scene, it takes second place, of course, to the tragedy of the life brutally ended. If it’s not a crime scene at all, there are a hundred unexpected stings waiting for the one who has to cross that threshold uninvited. There’s the t-shirt that didn’t quite make the hamper, the crossword with six clues still blank, the birthday card from two weeks ago, still standing open on the end table. There’s the ache of things just finished, things in progress, things left undone. 

Gordon Burns’ home is somewhere in between, a secondary crime scene, because the violence done to his body—in life _and_ in death—wasn’t enough for his killer. It’s terrible. It packs its own specific punch, but it’s a known quantity for both of them, right up until it isn’t. Not quite.

The scent reaches her first. She lowers her gun as Esposito announces the all-clear, and she spies the uncapped bottle of vodka on the table by the windows that’s relatively undisturbed. It’s not enough to account for the smell, not nearly enough. She scans the scene, and there are bottles everywhere. There’s a spiraling moment where she can’t seem to see anything but bottles—intact and smashed, upright and rolling on their sides, empty and almost empty.

She feels a sodden rug squelch under her feet. It recharges the stale smell of alcohol. An unfamiliar, unsteady feeling comes over her. It’s a wave of something like long-buried anger, with a healthy measure of fear mixed in. Her dad. Her mind is suddenly, stubbornly on her dad—the nights she came home to scenes like this on a smaller scale, the danger he might be in because she doesn’t know what the people who killed her mom want, but she knows now the lengths they’ll go to.

She shakes herself. She takes a deep breath and regrets the necessity of it instantly. The smell—the smell will get to her forever. But she takes herself to task and snaps her focus back to the scene before her—the violated home of her victim. She states the obvious, right out loud.

_Well, whatever he was working on, someone didn’t want us to find it._

She looks up expectantly. She seeks out the familiar sight of him roaming, picking things up, putting them down. She waits for his reply—a joke, an observation, a wild theory spun from a single object—but he’s still. He’s gone absolutely still.

_You okay?_

He’s obviously not okay. He’s holding the other half of this tragedy by a trailing handkerchief in case they need to get prints off the framed photo of the man and his daughter. In case they need to get in on the business of invading these lives.

He has a memory to share—watching the bright young thing coloring quietly while her dad signed books. It helps her to re-center, that moment of humanity, though she knows he must feel foolish for the worry he carries every minute for his nearly grown-up daughter and the everyday melodramas of the teen years.

She’s not okay and he’s not okay, either, and a vic’s home always packs its own specific punch. But they have a job to do, and after a few quiet words and a smile between them, they’re back to it.

She feels tired, though. The whole case through, she feels worn down by the petty back-and-forth between the Nicks in all their configurations. She’s exhausted by terrible fact that they have, in the end, solved the murder of Nina Burns as well and all the roaring fury that comes along with it. She’s tired and sees that he is, too.

“You busy?” she asks.

They’re leaving together. They’ve wrapped up everything at last, and they’re leaving. She’s tired, he’s tired, and the question comes out of the blue.

“Tonight?” He almost winces. His face is a study in contradictions. “Am I busy right now?”

“You are,” she laughs. She follows his jittery gaze down to the phone in his hand. “Alexis?”

“No,” he says quickly. He swaps the phone to his other hand and presses the screen to his coat. “I mean, yes … it’s nothing. I’m not really _busy_ per se—“

“You are,” she says again. There’s a sore, disappointed little place inside her, but she smiles. “It’s okay, Castle.”

“But you were going to—” He heaves a sigh, frustrated with himself or maybe with the world in general. “If I weren’t busy …”

“Nothing.” She shrugs. “I don’t know. Coffee or something. Not a drink.”

The last part slips out. She feels queasy all over again.

“Not a drink,” he agrees quietly, and the look in his eyes tells her he knows what the trouble is. He knows the particular sting she’s been feeling, and she’s grateful. “I’m trekking a ridiculously long way for pizza. You’re more than welcome.”

“How long is long?” she asks. She pictures him mushing a team of sled dogs across the tundra.

“Off the island.” He shudders, then remembers that he’s supposed to be tempting her. “But it’s worth it.”

“No doubt.” She looks at the floor and realizes they’ve been standing in front of the elevator without either of them having pushed the button. She reaches past him to remedy the situation, and the sore, disappointed little place inside her stings a little more. “Another time. Raincheck.”

“Raincheck.” He gives a firm nod, but she thinks it stings a little for him, too. He needs and wants to be with his daughter tonight, but it still stings to say _Until tomorrow._ “For not a drink.”

“Raincheck,” she echoes, stepping into the elevator beside him. And then, because she’s tired, because she’s not okay, and he’s not okay, because life is hard and unkind, because she damned well feels like it, she slyly adds, “not a date for not a drink.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: So many liquor bottles around that trashed apartment, tho … good job, properties. Hmmm.


	21. Of the Commons—The Dead Pool (3 x 21)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He is not a jealous person. He is no longer a jealous person.

He is not a jealous person. He is no longer a jealous person.

 _No longer_ is probably closer to the truth. He leafs through ancient journals from time to time and sees that his younger self was, by nature, no freer from it than anyone. He sees stupidity of that ilk inscribed on the page. Kyra spending too much time, paying to much attention to this person, to that person. And even before Kyra, days in a row of misery at the possibility—the near certainty—that the mysterious Allison was dancing in someone else’s arms.

But for better than a decade—for most of his daughter’s life—jealousy has been an absolutely academic issue for him. He crafts it on the page. He leafs through ancient journals and studies the phenomenon from every angle. He plucks the right phrases from them when the narrative requires it. He adapts the time elapsed to the pace of whatever story he’s working on, and there he has it—fictional jealousy made to order.

He’s removed from it, though. Even when he goes to the well of his distant past, he’s drawing things up by the numbers. He’s not really _remembering_ in any meaningful sense. He honestly _can’t_ remember what it was like in his mind—in his heart, he supposes, or maybe it’s both—before Meredith strayed and he just … threw a switch inside him.

He had a child to think of, because Meredith wouldn’t. He had that very fact staring him in the face. It was such a simple thing to throw that switch.

All of this is true. He is not a jealous person. It’s not something smug and self-satisfied that he repeats to himself as though it’s necessarily a virtue. It’s a simple truth right up until the moment he sees those fucking muffins.

It’s like being possessed. It’s like a fireball about to roar up and out of him. With shaking hands, drops the muffin he’s been unwise enough to pick up. He snatches the card from the plastic spear shoved haphazardly into the obscene forest of baked goods, and he can hardly speak. He can hardly get the oily, suggestive words out.

The rage burns itself out. It leaves behind a sick, leaden feeling. She’s teasing him. She’s slyly intimating that this might have been her first muffin-worthy get-together with Alex Conrad, but it’s unlikely to be the last. He sees the smug smile and the exaggerated stretch that tantalizingly ripples down the buttons of her blouse, but her voice sounds far off. The whole scene feels miserable and unreal and terribly distant.

He is jealous, and he’s long since forgotten any coping mechanisms he might have had for this.

His instinct, in so far as he has any instincts in this scenario, is to detach—to analyze and deflect. It’s ludicrous to be jealous of Alex Conrad, he tells himself, and it sounds entirely reasonable. She has a boyfriend, he reasons. A man friend. She has Josh the motorcycle-riding, world-saving, nine-foot-tall wonder. Alex Conrad and his trying-too-hard muffins can’t hold a candle to that.

He feels better. Perversely, _idiotically,_ for a full three seconds, the fact of Josh makes him feel better. That’s how bad he is at this. That’s the price of throwing that switch.

It’s like a bandage ripped off too soon. It’s like a scar sliced open again, deeper this time. Infinitely deeper. 

It comes equipped with catharsis, at least. That’s something, he supposes. Standing there, sitting there, carrying on with the case like he is not shaking with rage one moment and riding waves of despair the next, he feels at last. He dwells briefly in the Meredith years. He burns with the humiliation of the months he was determined to look the other way, because of Alexis. Because he would have done anything to keep her family intact. He lives through—emerges from—the multifaceted pain of it, and the truth is, it’s not much. There are no ancient journal pages inscribed with his longing for Meredith, but it hurt. Of course it fucking hurt, but he threw the switch before he had a chance to actually _feel_ that. 

He sees the pattern he fell into thereafter—wild, brief affairs on the road, away from home, safely on the surface of things when and where it wouldn’t touch his home life. He understands the twice-over allure of Gina and cold certainty. He understands the appeal of the absolute limits of what he could feel for her, she for him, when stability seemed the next logical step.

He dwells, he sees, he feels at long last. And he moves on. It’s belated, rapid fire catharsis, and he wishes that counted for something. He wishes that this sudden personal growth, brought to you by an enormous, enormously _stupid_ basket of muffins counted for something.

It doesn’t though, because this is now. This is _her,_ and he understands that he’s hardly _begun_ to understand the full extent of his jealousy. He’s hardly begun to know the boundless _want_ he has for every part, every side, every aspect of her.

He is greedy for it. He is jealous. And no catharsis—nothing in his past—could possibly have prepared him for this.

He has no coping mechanisms at all.

That’s the tragedy of the muffins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Um. I really hate muffins? Hmmm


	22. Archimedes—To Love and Die in LA (3 x 22)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The danger with him—the constant danger—is that with him, she feels safe. She feels comfortable in her skin. With him, she is vulnerable to idle chatter, even though she knows there’s no such thing with a writer. There’s no such thing between the two of them, and yet with him, she’s prone to reminisce, to share, to reveal. The danger with him is that she feels like herself, and that’s not something she’s allowed to be.

The danger with him—the constant danger—is that with him, she feels safe. She feels comfortable in her skin. With him, she is vulnerable to idle chatter, even though she knows there’s no such thing with a writer. There’s no such thing between the two of them, and yet with him, she’s prone to reminisce, to share, to reveal. The danger with him is that she feels like herself, and that’s not something she’s allowed to be.

She knows she’s not allowed, certainly not with Royce’s killer to catch, with home and their two complicated lives almost three thousand miles away. That’s the other danger with him. When it’s just the two of them and they have five minutes of blessed peace, everything seems simple and it’s not. It really is not.

This is the truth that breaks the moment—safe and seemingly simple—and drives her to her feet. This is the truth that murmurs _I should go_ to herself and _Good night_ to him. She wants to run. She feels like she should run, and as she focuses every bit of will she has on keeping her steps slow and measured, a laugh and a memory of a childhood summer game scurry on tiptoe up her spine.

A shiver runs all through her body. She wants to turn back. She wants to throw herself right back on the couch curl up close to him. She wants to tick the best hiding places off on her fingers and ask if he played, too. _Ghost in the Graveyard._ He’s every bit the child of Manhattan that she is, and still, he must have played in a park somewhere. At sleep away camp. He must have, and suddenly and not so suddenly, she wants to know all about it. She wants to turn back.

She doesn’t, though. Even when he calls her name _—Kate—_ and the tension in her body uncoils itself and slithers away, she doesn’t turn until her fingers are curled around the door’s silver handle.

_Glue!_

She feels a wild urge to shout it, to tell him she’s safe on glue and he has to be the Ghost again. She feels a sharp tug back toward him. She wants to stay up late with him and sob over Royce. She wants to tell childhood stories and crow about how ridiculous a sunrise is with the water on the wrong side. She wants to give in to the simplicity of being with him. She wants to give in to that feeling of safety.

She says good night a second time instead. _Good night, Castle._

She closes the door with infinite care, all but silently, and holds fast to its silver handle. She closes her eyes and concentrates on the smooth curve of cool metal in her palm. It undulates like a wave, and the metaphor is useful right now. She waits for this particular danger to curl over on itself, to crash and dissipate, but the moment is long in coming.

She flattens her back against the door. She lets go of the handle and drags her fingers savagely through her hair. She curls her fists against the words that still so badly want to break free and find their way to him. She hammers at the inside of her own body, her own mind, shouting that it’s an illusion—she’s not safe, it’s not simple, she’s not allowed to be herself.

The litany fails her, though. Tonight, the usual litany fails. It might be Royce’s letter—the hard part, and damn him for that. It might be the regret she’ll carry all the rest of her life that they ended in such bitterness. It might be the three-thousand miles between her and everything that seems so complicated every minute of her life, but the litany fails.

She reaches again for the door’s silver handle. The metal feels warm and alive against her skin this time. Its smooth curve feels like a wave just building, just finding its momentum. Childhood rushes at her headlong again in the instant her weight falls against the door. In the instant before it opens, she remembers.

There was an uncle, a great uncle, or maybe a cousin of her mother’s. He was a huge, jolly man she only saw at the huge, extended family picnic that happened every few years. He specialized in tossing children in the air. In the middle of a huge meadow, he would grab them by their skinny or thick or knobby ankles and flip them, end over end. He specialized in catching them at the last moment— the gloriously very last moment, to the shrieking delight of the children, to the absolute horror of every other adult. 

That’s how she feels as the door swings open, safe and deliciously unsafe. She feels like herself and she wants to rest in that a while. She wants to dwell with him in simplicity. But the door swings open on an empty room—a not quite empty room. It swings open on another door just closing.

She watches until the last second. The very last. She fixes her gaze on the curved silver handle. It points downward as he closes the door with infinite care, all but silently. It points downward for a long moment. She pictures his fingers wrapped tight around it, waiting for the wave to break.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: After the tragedy of muffins, Brain gives you 900 words about a door handle. Hmmm.


	23. Pretty Much—Pretty Dead (3 x 23)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s such a thing as too much information. This personal credo of his, go figure, is remarkably unpopular with a number of cops he could mention, but this case, with its boom mics and wall-to-wall camera coverage, is obviously a case in point.

There’s such a thing as too much information. This personal credo of his, go figure, is remarkably unpopular with a number of cops he could mention, but this case, with its boom mics and wall-to-wall camera coverage, is obviously a case in point.

There’s Victor Baron himself, of course. The man, to exactly no one’s surprise, turns out to be nothing but underbelly, but without his addiction to documentation, all-too-conspicuous consumption, and a life lived entirely in public, he might not be out an indubitably five-figure vase, to say nothing of potentially staring down the barrel of a defunct pageant and who knows how much in alimony in the not so distant future.

And then there’s Bobby Stark. Certainly, he’d personally like to forget absolutely everything he’s learned about America’s dad in the last seventy-two hours. It’s just a matter of whether he wants to forget the restraining orders, The Bobby Rocket’s social media debut, or—dear God—the strawberry-scented “goddess train” first. 

But these two professional oversharers and their ilk aren’t really what his credo is about, at least not entirely. He ruminates on pageant espionage and the Debbie Winakers of the world, whose genuinely fine qualities might best be admired from a distance. He thinks of Joy Jones and Amber Middleberry in the Little Miss Spangles years and laments the things that get lost not just in the drive to win, but the sea of detail, endlessly filled by pageant consultants and constant surveillance.

And orbiting around all that are the closer-to-home dramas born of—or at least complicated by—information overload.

He chuckles at the sight of the Captain buttonholing not just his own people, but what seems like every passerby, to survey them about an anniversary gift. He imagines the cluttered mental inventory the man must be doing—what he’s gotten her in the past, what he should have gotten her but didn’t, what she’s asked for, hinted at, demanded, warned him to never, ever get her.

He frets over Alexis and her seemingly off-the-cuff knowledge of the distance between New York and every school Ashley’s been accepted to. He’s shocked to the point of being personally offended as a dyed-in-the-wool romantic who must have passed at least some genetic material on to her that she’s been looking up statistics on high school romance survival rates. He both does and definitely does not want to know where one would even go to find such a ridiculously specific data set, and it hurts an astonishing amount that Beckett is so matter-of-fact in praising his daughter’s practicality. 

As usual, Beckett is kind of where he lands, credo-wise.

She definitely doesn’t think there’s such a thing as too much information, and it’s rare that a detail escapes her notice. It’s rarer still that she forgets any tidbit she learns along the way, and of course, he has a distressing tendency to overshare, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. Add to that the fact that he might not be the Baron, and he’s mercifully not Bobby Stark, but as Montgomery’s barb about the shelf-life of both of his marriages drives home, he’s lived some of the more miserable parts of his life in public, so she’s been piecing together a version of him since before they even met.

Most of the time, he doesn’t mind that, as far as he goes, it’s information overload for her. She’s the exception to the credo, both coming and going, and he revels in surprising her. He delights in unabashedly owning his foibles and defying her expectations at every turn.

But it’s upsetting—it’s alarming—how cooly she talks about love and the odds in the same breath. He thinks about the things he knows about her love life. He thinks about Sorenson and the Grunge rocker, about Demming and Josh, and the fact that he can pretty much count them on one hand suddenly doesn’t seem to be the sole result of her not being an oversharer, intentionally or otherwise. It suddenly seems like, for her, love might not be in the same boat as psychics and Santa Claus, but it might dock nearby.

He wonders how many days and nights she’s spent alone because the data she’d gathered—the information she’d accumulated with infinite care—pointed to a high probability of failure someday. Someday. It hurts his heart to think of it for her sake. It troubles him deeply for his own.

He thinks back on the painful missed moments the two of them have suffered. He’s been in the habit of thinking of them in terms of things he wished he’d known—how profoundly her mother’s death had shaped every aspect of her life in those first years afterward, that the Demmings of the world would suddenly bring his own feelings into sudden, sharp relief, that the Demmings of the world would come and go in such short order.

He’s lamented each one as a simple matter of crossed signals, misjudgment, bad timing. He’s written Josh off as more of the same, and even though there are days when he simply cannot believe the guy is still hanging around, he’s resolved to hold fast this time, to make his feelings and intentions as clear as he can without overstepping. He’s resolved keep showing up, and it gives him hope that she smiles like she knows all about his resolutions and tells him it’s a good choice.

That gives him hope, but he can’t help but wonder suddenly if their entire past is math, not simply missed opportunities—if she’s been working it out long hand, and that’s what’s kept them doing the wrong kind of dance for two damned years. He can’t help but wonder if she’s calculated the odds and determined that he is not—they are not—worth the risk.

He can’t help but wonder if she has too much information.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Gotta love a meta boom mic. Hmmm.


	24. Corpus—Knockout (3 x 24)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her grandfather had been cremated, per his wishes, which he had voiced loudly and frequently, even before he got sick. He used to make her laugh about it. They’d walk the streets together, they’d duck down the alleyway and through the iron gate into the Marble Cemetery and he’d rail against all the space in Manhattan that had been long-since wasted on the dead.

Her grandfather had been cremated, per his wishes, which he had voiced loudly and frequently, even before he got sick. He used to make her laugh about it. They’d walk the streets together, they’d duck down the alleyway and through the iron gate into the Marble Cemetery and he’d rail against all the space in Manhattan that had been long-since wasted on the dead.

 _This way I get to stay, Katie,_ he’d say, giving her a long, sober nod before breaking into a smile. _Provided it’s not too windy._

She’d thought she was okay with it, the idea of his body, wrapped simply in a good linen sheet and placed in an absolutely minimal cardboard container, being reduced to ash. She’d researched how it was accomplished, how long it would take, the details. She’d armed herself with information about the myriad of things people all over the world do to honor the dead. She’d gone over the reasons he’d told her, the history of the practice he’d shared, and she’d been sure that she was fine.

But when the time had come—when she had known the time and place he would be taken from the world so completely—she’d howled. She’d broken down utterly and beaten her fists against her father’s chest, unable to let go of the punishing details she’d filled her own head with. She’d sobbed uncontrollably in her mother’s arms when she’d meant to be strong for them both. She’d meant to be okay with all of it, because she’d promised her grandfather that she would be. And she was, when they scattered his ashes, at least. It wasn’t too windy.

They’d buried her mother in the absence of any instructions. _I don’t know,_ her dad had said a hundred times to what seemed like a hundred people who just wanted to help _. I don’t know. We never spoke about it._

She’d been angry with him even then—even that early—for not knowing. She’d bottled it up, but she’d been so _angry_ that he didn’t know, that he hadn’t bothered find out and there he was, so helpless when they needed to know.

In the end, they’d buried her, off the island, of course, near family. Her mother, though they’d had a fractious relationship, her own grandfather whom she’d adored. Kate hadn’t howled at the graveside. She’d hardly so much as cried, knotted up inside as she had been.

But she remembers the shocking sensation of the ground rolling beneath her feet as the coffin lowered and the Herculean effort of uncurling her fingers to drop the rose into the open grave. She remembers thinking what a terrible waste it all seemed—being certain far too late that her mother would have found it all such a terrible waste.

She doesn’t know how she might have been without this—without her grandfather’s wishes, and knowing only what her mother would not have wanted. She might never have known how she is, but the truth as it is in the world she inhabits is that she’s good with bodies.

A well-meaning, if not exactly silver tongued, classmate at the Academy had told her that, and it’s true. Unlike so many, even in her line of work, she’s never found the street suddenly rushing up to meet her, no matter how brutal or strange a fate has befallen a victim. She’s never had to take care to eat or not eat, drink or not drink, before she heads to a scene.

But it’s more than a strong stomach and being steady on her feet. She’s good with bodies, regardless of who the victim was in life. Lanie has told her that. She’s told her in that dry, matter-of-fact way, that it’s commodity too often in short supply among cops, and the approbation—the gratitude of her friend—means the world to Kate.

He—Castle—has _shown_ her this in the pages of his books. He has reflected back to her her own compassion, respect, and a deep, instinctive empathy that she herself would not have had words for. She’s held that in her heart on the darkest of days and told herself that she has done, is doing something worthwhile. She’s doing something right. 

She’s good with bodies, except she has not been.

Gary McCallister presents himself as Exhibit A. Lockwood is a broad expanse of prison orange, that’s her first image. Her second is the blank stare and blood-spattered face. The improvised shiv and her rage come next, the snarled word that tasted like tar _—Go._

Those are the images that have played over and over in her mind and it’s only now—only _now_ —that she sees the simple black Bible clutched on McCallister’s chest. It’s only now that she sees the careful cutout of a child’s hand and the cluster of photographs. It’s only now that she thinks of the body with the once-white towel obscuring his face. 

It’s Ryker—Exhibit B—that truly damns her, though. She’d known him. She might have ultimately found that there was no digging deep enough for true compassion for McCallister, but she’d known Ryker, yet when she thinks about the scene of his death—when she thinks about the body—she recalls almost nothing except rage, frustration, fury that yet another man had died with answers locked inside him. When she thinks about the body, she hears Lanie’s voice, sounding strange, reciting details. When she thinks about the body, she can’t even recall if his eyes were closed.

She has not been good with bodies. She has failed in her duty, and this—the horror of this moment, rushing up to meet he—feels like the wages of sin.

She falls on Roy Montgomery’s body, howling. She smells cordite as she presses her palms to his chest and feels the warmth abandoning him already. The pool of blood beneath him is black in the ice-blue light outside the hangar. She sees her face in it, distorted. Her tears fall and meet surface tension. They fall and send out sluggish ripples. Her hands make their way to his face. His eyes are closed, at least. She pleads with him and curses him. She orders him not to die, not like this. Not when she has failed, is failing.

“You’re not, Kate.” His voice, his hands on her shoulders, are like falling in a dream and being shocked awake. “You haven’t—you didn’t fail. Beckett, I’m so sorry.”

He pulls her away from the body. He pulls her into his arms, and over his shoulder, she sees the sharply defined edge of the drying blood pool. She’s lost time. She’s skipped back and jumped forward and it’s not just warmth abandoning his body by now. It’s cold creeping in to do its work. 

“I don’t know,” he’s saying, and she has no idea why. She has no idea what question he might be answering, what demand she might have made. “Whatever it is, we’ll be there. I’ll be there with you.”

There are sirens now, in the distance. She stares at him, aghast. “Why?” she asks. The question barely stirs the air. “Do you hear them?”

“I hear them,” he says quickly. “You called, remember? You told them multiple …” He’s been absolutely steady until now, but his eyes skip from body to body and so on. “Multiple men down,” he finishes. He’s bearing up, steeling himself. “I called Ryan and Espo—”

“They know.” It’s a fresh shock, the recall of that. “They knew. They tried—” The memory of the phone in her hand—the twenty three missed calls—strikes hard. “Did you—he called you. Did you know?”

“I didn’t.” He squeezes her hands and frowns. They’re cold. They’re ice cold. “He just told me to come. He said that you would need—need me.”

She did need him. She presses his hands and her hands and the knot of them together into her thighs. She does need him. Her friend and mentor is dead. The man who betrayed her, the man who gave his life for her, is dead and she needs him.

But the sirens are growing louder. The lights are visible now, sweeping unimpeded across the vast open spaces of the airfield. She disentangles her hands from his and struggles to her feet. He does the same. They can see faces through car windows now.

Their hands find one another for the briefest of moments as they stand beside the body of a man they loved, a man who loved them, and then she’s on. She’s introducing herself, briskly. She’s telling a story, the contents of which have been unknown to her until this very minute.

She tells the truth—the essence of it—that her Captain gave his life to protect her and countless others.

She walks the scene and identifies the others to the best of her ability.

She is good at this. She’s good with bodies. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Sorry, this is … probably disturbing. But what if Beckett doesn’t make it this time, folks? Hmmm. 


End file.
